


advil, corporeal manifestation, and other clauses in the roommate contract

by thescrewtapedemos



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Ghosts, Humor, M/M, Slow Burn, Team as Family, set in some weird future that has all the 17-18 knights, standard disclaimer that i don't care about timelines and never ever will, tuch is in this but he's evil don't worry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-25
Updated: 2018-06-25
Packaged: 2019-05-28 05:40:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15041960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thescrewtapedemos/pseuds/thescrewtapedemos
Summary: “You’re not allowed to fuck the ghost,” Flower says, apropos of absolutely fucking nothing.“I'm not fucking the ghost!” David squawks. “Ican'tfuck the ghost!”“Is that the only reason you're not fucking the ghost?” Reaves asks, and David puts his face into his hands. “Because like, I'm accepting and shit, it's okay if you want to even though you can't.”





	advil, corporeal manifestation, and other clauses in the roommate contract

**Author's Note:**

> perron or reaves or BOTH are going to get fucked off to the fuckin islanders or something in free agency and i WILL shit my pants but this fic exists in a happy netherfuture where i don’t have to stan someone on the islanders. this is why i have depression
> 
> EDIT - yeah the blues are alright that's alright w me  
> DOUBLE EDIT - me, a matt martin fanboy now: goddamnit
> 
> in light of that, this is all moliver’s fault. good FUCKING yard
> 
> enjoy xoxo

The first sign David’s life is about to go completely insane comes at four in the morning. 

They'd lost a game the night before, and then climbed onto the plane pretty much immediately after, and David loves his team probably more than is strictly healthy but he had been ready to murder every single one of them halfway through the redeye. 

He showers to get the worst of the airplane smell off, stumbles out of the shower and barks his shin on the toilet because the apartment is still pretty new to him, and goes to the sink to brush the sour coffee taste out. He's so fucking tired the room is spinning a little and he's working pretty hard not to think about the lost game and just, fuck. 

He ducks to spit and when he comes back up the word **beware** is traced out in vaguely shaky English in the condensation fog on the mirror. 

“Huh,” he says, and then goes to bed.

-[]-

He’s not totally sure why his apartment still feels so fucking weird.

He’d loved it when he’d visited with his realtor. It’s got a big picture window looking out across a courtyard for residents only, so he can pretend he has a view without risking any fans taking pictures through his window and putting his naked ass on Instagram. There’s a guest bedroom he’s put some free weights in and called his private gym despite the fact there’s also a bed in there because, like, that’s what hockey players do he supposes. The kitchen is pretty nice too. 

It’s just, he comes home and the whole place feels unfriendly. Kind of cold no matter where he puts the thermostat. His neighbors must run up a crazy air conditioning bill. And no matter how closely he watches shit in the kitchen his food comes out overcooked or underdone. 

Probably, it’s just that he doesn’t spend a lot of time there, he decides. Going over to eat with the Fleurys and play with Scarlett or getting a little too trashed and passing out on Karlsson’s couch is just more fun. 

Maybe he’ll get a PS4 or something. Maybe he’ll redecorate. In the off-season.

-[]-

The second time, he comes home _wasted_.

He blames Flower for this. Flower, and celebratory shots, and his own complete inability to say no when Flower's eyes go big and damp and doelike. He needs to dig up Crosby’s number and ask him how he'd developed immunity. Presumably he had. 

David _hopes_ he had. Flower is a weapon of mass intoxication and David needs countermeasures, for the sake of his liver. 

It takes him a few tries to get the door open and he almost forgets to lock it again behind him, stumbling back and forth down the hallway and muttering to himself. The apartment is cold, and kind of dark and unwelcoming. He frowns at it and then heads to the bathroom for a glass of water. 

There's a word smeared onto the bathroom mirror. 

David blinks at it a few times. It resolves in his vision, undeniably real. He teeters forward and squints.

**BEWARE**

It looks like it'd been done in… David squints some more. His own fucking toothpaste, he decides. 

This, he realizes, is Flower's fault. Fucking pranksters. 

“ _So_ convincing,” he mumbles sarcastically to the toothpaste and decides he's gonna deal with the whole thing whenever his hangover lets up tomorrow.

-[]-

“Cute prank,” he says to Flower later at practice, and grins when Flower starts guiltily.

“I don’t know what you mean!” he says and skates away quickly. David grins and lets him go. 

Later he goes to put on his shoes and they’re full of shaving cream and David throws them across the room at Flower, because fucking _really_? Two pranks in a row?

But Flower’s frowning in confusion and David… David doesn’t really get it.

-[]-

His washer dyes all his boxers a streaky greyish pink.

-[]-

Some days, David knows this, you play your hardest and it means nothing.

Some days, and he’s holding it together as he gets his key in the door, you play your heart out, you play until you can taste blood in your mouth, you play with everything you have to give and then dig up that last little bit you didn’t know you had, and it means nothing. Some days you lose even then. Some days you’re just unlucky. 

The apartment is cold and dark, of course, and David keeps it together until he gets to the kitchen. There’s pots and pans strewn across the floor, somehow tipped off of the shelves he’d left them sitting on. He stares down at them and he isn’t going to break his hand punching a hole in the wall. He isn’t going to risk it. 

Some days, you miss the goal that would have tied the game in the last minute of the third period. Some days the loss is all on you. 

He bloodies the first two knuckles of his hand against a support beam and goes to bed without bandaging them or putting the pans away.

-[]-

His painkillers are out on the counter when he stumbles his way into the bathroom the next morning. He doesn’t remember leaving them out on the counter before he left the night before. It’s not out of the question that he could have, but he just… doesn’t remember it.

The pots and pans are still on the floor. He tidies them away and tries not to think about anything too much. 

He does take a pill though. His hand aches. Stupid, stupid.

-[]-

“I think I’m losing my mind,” he pants out against Reaves’ shoulder during practice. They’re halfway through the bag skates Gallant has prescribed as an antidote to deepthroating the Ducks’ dick the night before. David’s pretty sure he’s about to throw up a lung.

“You’re telling _me_ ,” Reaves gasps out and shakes sweat all over David. “I’m gonna pass out, Jesus.” 

“Again!” Gallant calls from the other side of the rink, and Reaves swears quietly and pushes off, and David doesn’t have the time or the stamina to explain that no, he meant he’s probably going actually insane.

-[]-

He’s trying to microwave a pop tart because fuck the diet plan, he’d skated off at least ten pounds and he needs the calories and also the comfort food.

The ache of losing has ebbed enough that he can pretend it’s just his lungs still protesting the cardio work. It’s made harder by the fact his hand still aches when he accidentally knocks his knuckles against anything, a reminder of how fucking stupid he’d been last night. He needs something else to focus on. He needs to move on. He _really_ needs a pop tart. 

His microwave, of course, is fucking refusing to cooperate. 

“Fuck you,” David suggests to it. It beeps at him in response and he hopefully opens the door to poke at the pop tart. 

Stone cold. David hauls in a breath, holds it until the hysterical frustration has abated enough that he’s not about to try to punch out a household appliance. One set of stupidly bloodied knuckles he can forgive in himself, but a shitty microwave really isn't worth it. 

He sets it for another thirty seconds and watches the pop tart revolve under the cheerful microwave light and feels insanity creeping in on silent feet. 

The pop tart is still cold. 

“Your mother's a _whore_ ,” he shouts at the microwave, in French because the fact that he's going insane and his apartment hates him shouldn't have him sullying the ears of his neighbor's children. 

The aircon kicks on right on cue, blasting cold air all over the place. 

He eats his cold pop tart on the couch and vengefully gets crumbs everywhere.

-[]-

“Think my apartment’s possessed,” he jokes to Flower offhandedly on their next enforced team fun bonding night. Flower looks thoughtful instead of mocking, which might have more to do with the number of empty shot glasses in front of him than anything.

“It’s possible!” he pronounces at last. “Everything’s possible in Vegas.” 

David has to cheers to that, and then he loses track of, well, everything. When he wakes up on Karlsson’s couch feeling like he’s dying he’s just grateful it’s not a gutter somewhere.

-[]-

His drains back up. He isn’t even surprised. He just sighs tiredly and calls his building manager and goes to stay on Flower’s couch for a day or so.

The season is starting in earnest. He’s tired all the time and doesn’t have it in him to deal with the smell of rotting food permeating everything.

-[]-

“Listen,” he begins, speaking into the cavernous unknown that is his horrible apartment and feeling vaguely piteous, “it's game day.”

To David's mind, that should be enough. Game day is sacred. Game day is hallowed ground, forbidden territory, a place marked off with caution tape and red marker in all caps: _DO NOT TOUCH MOTHERFUCKER_. It's known that game day is not to be fucked with. He just… isn't sure that fact’s been communicated to his apartment yet. 

David's aware that this is the final proof positive that he's going insane, but honestly. Whatever works. He's sick of his apartment fucking with him. 

“It's game day,” he repeats into the quiet of the air conditioner whirring away. “Any other day, but not game day. Please.” 

There's no sign of approval, which there wouldn't be because none of this is _real_ and he's going _insane_ , but, like, fucking whatever. He tried. 

He goes to take his nap feeling bitter and kind of vindicated.

-[]-

He wakes up and his bedroom isn't unpleasantly chilly for once. It's actually a pretty normal temperature.

There's nothing else wrong with his apartment either. He leaves it feeling kind of nonplussed but shakes it off before he's even gotten into the car. He has a game to fucking win.

-[]-

He comes home from winning the game and there's a giant fuckoff spider sitting in the middle of his dinner table, but he really can't be sure that's his apartment’s fault. Vegas has some fucked up bugs.

-[]-

Three days later and he comes home from a hard practice and a nice, nutritionist-approved lunch and he's feeling so good. He'd slept well the night before, finally remembering to pull the comforter he shouldn't need in fucking _Vegas_ out of storage.

He feels magnanimous with victory and health, dropping his bag by the door to deal with later and going to the kitchen for a well-earned celebratory beer. 

The pots and pans are strewn across the kitchen floor again. David sips his beer and examines them, contemplative. 

“Not exactly original,” he judges and goes to air out his pads before they turn into a biohazard.

-[]-

Next morning he goes to pour himself a bowl of cereal and the milk comes out in lumpy, gooey clots. He spends a little while staring at it, and then glances nervously at the pots and pans gleaming from the shelf he'd returned them to.

He checks the expiration date on the carton. It's in two weeks. 

He considers apologizing to the apartment. 

“I'm going crazy,” he says instead, and pulls out his phone to badger Smith into getting breakfast with him.

-[]-

His air conditioner stops working and David nearly cries.

It's the middle of a heat wave that makes David nauseous even to think about, eighty degree weather in _November_ is obscene and he doesn't care how Canadian he sounds when he says it. He's also pretty sure that his apartment has somehow managed to turn on the heater, even though it's always off when he hauls himself out of his sweaty heap on the couch to check. 

They have a game the next day. Their first matchup against the Jets since last season. He’s absolutely dreading the thought of going into it with the kind of night's sleep this temperature promises. 

He manages exactly twelve hours, shedding clothes as he goes and trying miserably to get the air conditioner working again before he sends out a pitiful mass text and accepts the first offer of a couch to stay on he gets. Engelland even offers dinner. Engelland, David knows, is an actual saint. 

He pulls his sweaty shirt back on and regrets ever even viewing this fucking possessed demonic apartment. 

Maybe he should, he thinks guiltily as he locks the door behind him and hating that he's caving like this, try apologizing.

-[]-

“Maybe your apartment's not possessed,” Engelland offers over reheated eggplant carbonara and some kind of fruit-yogurt thing that could be considered within the diet plan if he stretched.

“I do know I'm crazy,” David says and shovels more sauce in his mouth. 

“No, no,” Engelland says, slapping dismissively at the air. “Maybe it's haunted instead. Maybe you have a ghost.” 

“Huh.” David considers that. “Hope not.”

-[]-

“If I apologize,” David bargains with his empty apartment, “can I just, please, it's game day? One day of peace.”

He came back from spending the night at Engelland’s because he can't in good conscience mess with Engelland’s routine, not when they have a game tonight. He needs his own nap anyway, and a good lunch, but his apartment is still suffocatingly hot and humid. 

There's no answer because, obviously, David is insane. It doesn't really bother him as much as it should. At this point he's just hoping for the best. 

“I'm sorry for calling you unoriginal,” he says and doesn't actually even need to work to be sincere. “And, ah, I don't know if I did anything else. But if I did I'm sorry.” 

The silence reigns on. 

“It's game day,” David repeats hopelessly. “Just one nap. I'm begging.”

Another beat of silence and then-

The air conditioner kicks on with a cough and a blast of blessedly dusty air. Not yet cold, but with ambitions in that direction. David nearly bursts into tears, again. He doesn't actually care if he's going crazy, talking to himself alone in his thoroughly shitty apartment. He doesn't even care if his apartment is actually possessed. 

It's fucking game day. Nothing matters but the game. 

He falls into bed and pulls the sheet over himself and passes out in what feels like twenty seconds.

-[]-

He should have seen Byfuglien coming, is the thing.

It's fucking hard not to, with the size of the man, but they’re pushing through the neutral zone and the puck is singing for contact with his tape. He's just not paying attention. He doesn't have his head up. Byfuglien comes out of nowhere. 

He hits chest-first like a rookie and his helmet smacks off the ice and his vision kind of _goes_ for a second. 

When he can see again the crowd is still screaming and the refs haven't even reached him yet so he doesn’t think he actually passed out. His chest hurts with the impact and breathing in is hard and when he tries to get his arms under him they shake like a motherfucker. 

He pushes himself up a little and, wow, that's a fair amount of blood on the ice. 

“ _Perron,_ ” Reaves is shouting and it sounds very far away. He lets himself settle back onto the ice as the medics skate over because his arms are about to give out anyway and, shitting Christ, it turns out he’s actually in a lot of pain.

-[]-

He has a pair of cracked ribs and a possible very low-grade concussion and a nicely gruesome cut across the meat of his cheek the doctor assures him after the stitches come out will be a very small and dashing scar.

He grins dizzily up at the doctor, more because he’s got that good shit in him than the concussion he can already tell is going to fade in an hour or two. Everything sounds pretty great right now. They won the game apparently, despite the intermission to scrape the bloody ice up. David’s a fan of that, and also of this medication. It’s fucking really nice medication, even if he does kind of feel like throwing up even worse than he had before. 

“IR for the next four weeks at least,” he's kindly informed, and that’s enough to kick through the pleasant haze. He swallows down the instinct to whine because pain medication has always made him into an absolute child, and nods along. 

He’s not a stupid rookie anymore and he gets that he needs the recovery time. He just also hates it. 

The bad mood follows him out to his car and then vanishes in the face of Flower lounging against the hood like he isn’t tempting fate, hanging out without a hat or sunglasses in the parking lot after a game. He grins at David and hops into the driver’s seat like nothing in the world could possibly be wrong and David like, might be a little in love with him. He isn’t sure how much of that is the medication. 

“I’m taking you home,” Flower tells him through the open passenger window. 

“I’m in love with you,” David informs him and gets in the car. 

“That's to be expected,” Flower agrees amiably and reaches across the console to fish David’s keys out of his bag. “I do have a wife and she is more beautiful than you, though. Sorry.” 

“Ahh, well,” David sighs, and falls asleep against the headrest until Flower shakes him awake to get him up the stairs and to his apartment. 

Flower leaves him at the door with promises to get Reaves to stop by the next day to take him to get groceries and David spends a minute after he’s gone leaning against the doorframe and doing his best to take stock through the haze of painkillers. 

His ribs hurt and it’s more difficult to breathe than he likes. His head kind of hurts. His cheek is kind of numb but he can tell it _definitely_ won’t be later, and he pats his bag to remind himself where his nice painkillers are. He’s tired as hell and he knows he should probably eat something but then his stomach twinges to remind him it isn’t happy with him either. 

The doorway feels kind of like a death sentence. He really, truly, honest to Jesus doesn’t have it in him to handle whatever his possessed apartment has cooked up for him now. 

He sighs, knuckles at his good cheek, and unlocks his door. 

His paper towels have fallen into the sink and the apartment is at its familiar level of unpleasantly chilly but otherwise nothing seems so obviously wrong that it can’t be ignored until tomorrow when David glances around blearily. The glasses he’d left in the dishwasher are even still clean, and he fills one from the faucet without pulling out the paper towels because, honestly, it’s not like they’ll somehow magically become salvageable if he does. 

“Thank you,” he mumbles to his apartment at large, too fucked up to feel stupid, and crawls into bed to pass out without remembering to take off his socks.

-[]-

When he wakes up his bag is scattered across the room, which is pretty weird because he distinctly remembers leaving it by the door in a neat pile.

He doesn't think about it too hard because his whole body is one stiff, stinging ache. 

Getting sat up in bed is a process he gets himself through one painful step at a time, until he can swing over and try standing up. There's clothes underfoot, stray papers he thinks are old notes on old Knights plays. Balancing is hard, and he puts his hand out to the bedside table to steady himself. 

The little orange bottle of his really nice and _very_ necessary painkillers falls over with a rattle, and he settles back on the mattress with a little sigh of pain. 

He absolutely hadn't left the painkillers on the side table the night before. He'd left them in his bag, but they're here now, and the glass of water he'd left for himself is blessedly cool going down his parched throat. 

Overtaxed muscles are unlocking already, lovely placebo effect going to efficient work. David downs the rest of his water and gets creakily to his feet. The mess, he ignores. His stomach is growling and he should eat before the medication really hits him. 

He passes out again as soon as the painkillers hit, facedown and only mostly on the couch. He doesn't wake up until Reaves shoves him over cheerfully and calls him a dickhead.

-[]-

“My possessed apartment got out my painkillers for me last night,” he mumbles to Reaves as he's steered deftly around the grocery store.

The lights aren't aggravating his eyes at least, and he can read labels without any trouble. The concussion, if he’d even had one at all, is probably gone. It's just hard for him to pay attention to where he's going with all the lovely painkillers. 

Reaves is examining him speculatively when David remembers to look. 

“I don't think it's, maybe, the first time,” he continues without really thinking about it. The memory makes the first two knuckles of his left hand throb, which makes no sense, because all he's really feeling in his body is a really pleasant tingling. 

Reaves raises both eyebrows. 

“I know I'm crazy,” he says preemptively. Reaves shrugs. 

“Well,” he says cheerfully and stuffs an entire _pallet_ of chicken soup into the cart, “as long as you know. At least you're not a d-man.”

-[]-

He ejects Reaves from his apartment only after promising at great length that he really does know how to microwave his own damn soup, and then swearing at him until Reaves had thrown up his hands and left, laughing the whole way.

Dutifully he takes his painkillers and microwaves a cup of chicken noodle soup, patting the microwave dizzily when it actually comes out warm. He snaps a picture of the steaming cup and group-messages it to half the team. 

He drinks half of it down, laughing at the stupid string of indecipherable emoji Subban sends back, and falls asleep sprawled out on the couch.

-[]-

When he wakes up again the light is completely different and he rolls over, fuzzy and ready to sleep another ten hours, to discover it's early evening. All of the sleep debt of the season is catching up to him, he knows. His body yearning to repair and rebuild.

The cup of soup is still on the coffee table and there's impossible steam curling appealingly from it. 

He leaves the miracle soup on the table and goes to bed because he's exhausted and just, honestly, it's a lot to deal with on medication. 

“You're real,” David mumbles to the dim quiet of his room when he's finally wiggled clumsily under the sheets. 

He's already tipping back into sleep but the certainty is following him down. Whatever it is that's happening, whatever it is that's been harassing him and kept his stupid cup of chicken noodle soup warm, it's real. He's not crazy. No crazier than any other hockey player, anyway. 

There's no answer, but that's okay.

-[]-

He wakes up and the room is a perfect temperature and the curtains are drawn across the window. When he pulls himself out of bed the mess that his possessed apartment had made of strewing his bag all over the floor has been shoved to the corner of the room, which David knows for absolutely damn sure he hadn't done himself.

He's grinning when he gets to the kitchen and there's not a sign of mayhem at all, anywhere. 

The microwave works just the way it should, the fresh mug of soup revolving under the light and coming out a little too hot. He eats it in the living room, staring around at all the chaos that _hasn't_ been perpetrated in his absence. The whole place looks perfectly normal, except for the crusty old mug of soup from last night, now stone cold. 

David isn't fooled, and he hasn't taken his medication yet either. 

“Thank you,” he says happily, and only jumps a little when his PS3 beeps at him and ejects his DVD of Pretty Woman. 

He finishes his soup and takes a half dose of painkillers and dizzily puts on an episode of the Bachelorette.

-[]-

“So,” he says when the painkillers have worn off and he’s napped off the grogginess and eaten probably an inadvisable number of crackers. He puts his hands on his hips for good measure.

He’d chosen the spot strategically, next to but not in front of the big living room window because from there he can see almost the whole apartment except his bathroom and bedroom. If anything moves, if anything happens, he’ll see it. And something will, because he isn’t crazy, and whatever is happening is real. 

“So, you’re real.” 

There’s no response. David narrows his eyes. 

“I know you’re listening,” he says, and doesn’t even feel stupid. He knows he’s right. “I thought I was going crazy but I’m not, I know you’re there. Stop fucking around.” 

There’s a rustle, papers on the dining table fluttering in what could be the breeze from the air conditioner if he weren’t paying attention. He points at them. 

“There. You’re here.” 

The papers go absolutely still. Everything is silence with a tinge of stubbornness. David frowns. 

“You’re being fucking ridiculous, you fucking- You wrote _beware_ on my bathroom mirror, don’t be fucking stupid,” he says and gestures in the direction of the bathroom. He’s like, 95% sure it was his possessed apartment and not Flower pranking him. “I know you’re there, stop hiding.” 

The papers rustle again, swirling in an eddy of wind that doesn’t exist, fluttering up off the table and then onto the floor in a fan of loose paper. 

“See!” David exclaims and throws his hands up. “Are you done hiding?” 

The lights flicker. David nods along. 

“So you’re done sulking,” he says and laughs at the little localized hurricane that occurs around his dinner table. Papers swirling and fluttering back and forth like whatever it is can’t decide where to throw them. He’s kind of getting the hang of this whole thing, he can tell the thing is getting a little pissed at him. 

“Can we have a civilized conversation now?” he asks, and the papers fall still. 

He groans, annoyed, and nearly stamps his foot.

“Stop _hiding,_ you fucking coward,” he snaps and immediately regrets it. 

There's a pause, ominous and heavy, and then the room abruptly goes so cold David feels the goosebumps ripple down his arms and then-

The lamp in the corner hisses and shatters in a shower of glass and sparks. 

Silence falls like a guillotine. That strange cold ebbing back out from the room. Some invisible, intangible weight falling back from where it had pressed down for just a moment. 

“Oh,” David says faintly. 

He sits down to breathe into his knees for a while. 

Something in the room rustles a little bit. It sounds vaguely worried, and when he peeks up over his knees he sees that the papers that had fallen from his dinner table are shuffling around, sliding back and forth fretfully. Like someone’s shuffling them anxiously. 

He puts his face back into his knees until his heart isn’t beating too loud to hear anything else. 

“Can you talk?” is the first thing he manages to force out of his mouth that isn't a slightly gibbering and mildly hysterical laugh, a little while of breathing quietly later. It seems, somehow, despite everything, kind of crazy to address the question to the apartment at large. 

The lights flicker, flicker, and then from somewhere deeper in the apartment there’s a flurry of sharp knocks that makes David jump a little. He hauls in a calming breath. 

“Okay,” he manages. “Alright. Okay, yeah. Okay.” 

Another series of knocks, a little closer. Somewhere in the kitchen, David thinks. Jesus. 

“Okay, uh,” he tries. “One knock for yes and two for no?” 

A pause. A knock, this one very definitely in the room with him. Whatever it is that’s happening, it’s like right fucking here. 

“Are you…” he begins and then struggles with how to phrase this question. “Are you… the apartment?” 

A pause. Two knocks. No. 

“Jesus, what are you then?” David demands without thinking. 

This time the knocks are a steady series of them, distinctly sarcastic, meaningless except David can pretty much figure out what they mean and he huffs a laugh despite himself. _How am I supposed to tell you if you don’t guess, dumbass?_

He thinks about what Engelland had said, an eternity ago. 

“So, you’re, uh, are you a ghost?” he asks, and-

A knock. Singular. Yes. 

“Oh,” he says dazedly, “great.” 

He breathes into his knees for another little while.

-[]-

He takes another painkiller and a nap because he’s not sure what else to do.

Also because he knows better than to fuck with his medication schedule, knows better than to let his muscles get all stiff and seized up, because he’s ridden in _that_ particular rodeo often enough. But it’s kind of a bonus that drooling into his couch cushions like it’s his job prevents him from having to do anything else for a while. 

He can’t like, really make conversation with something that can’t talk. Paradoxically, now that he knows his apartment is actually, kind of, more or less a person, he feels weird about ignoring it. 

He drags himself to the kitchen for a Gatorade and an incredibly sad excuse for a sandwich because he can’t find the mayo or his nice cheese. He suspects Reaves liberated it. 

“So,” he says. He’s pretty sure the ghost is there. He doesn’t know where else it would be. “Are you, uh.” 

He struggles for a moment. He’s still groggy as shit and it’s _hard_ , trying to make conversations out of yes/no questions. 

“Are you a he?” he asks at last, and absolutely deserves the way his fridge rattles at him about it. “I can’t just keep calling you _it_ in my head, it feels fucking rude!” 

He grins when the single knock comes, an air to it of sarcastic annoyance he’s pretty sure he’s not just projecting. His ghost is a he, then. He feels a lot better about how much of the Bachelorette he’s watched. 

“Cool, cool,” he says, and the bowl of fruit at his elbow tips over and spills apples all over the floor.

-[]-

It takes him like, way too long to figure out how to progress past simple yes/no questions. He’d be ashamed of it, except he’s still on some medications that don’t do his clarity of mind any damn good, and the physical therapy to keep him in shape is killer.

“I’m never taking another hit from Byfuglien again,” he groans and closes his apartment door behind him, lets his bag rattle to the floor. Something deep in the apartment, he suspects his silverware drawer, rattles discordant greeting. 

“Good day?” he asks and grins sleepily when the ghost knocks once at him. He’d left the television on, NHL highlights because obviously he wants his ghost to be well-informed about the things that matter. What’s coming from the living room now is decidedly not any NHL commentator he’s ever heard, but he isn’t gonna call the ghost on that. 

“Good,” he murmurs and staggers to the bathroom for a shower. He smells of sweat, PT room, and exam table. It’s a rank and unpleasant combination. 

He showers fast, mostly just to get the sweat off, and brushes the sour medication-Gatorade combination out of his mouth staring at his own vague shape in the condensation mist on the mirror. 

The mirror. 

He has a brief and incredibly disorienting moment of déjà vu and drops his toothbrush on the ground. 

“Ghost, get in here,” he calls through the door and doesn’t bother to pick up the toothbrush. 

A moment later the door rattles and something knocks on the wall. David points at the mirror. 

“It’s your fault we didn’t think of this,” he informs the ghost. “You did this _before_ , you didn’t think to suggest it?” 

The glass that would hold his toothbrush if it weren’t on the ground tips over. David rolls his eyes. 

“Oh, yeah, writing beware on my mirror was real fuckin’ creative,” he snaps. 

The cup rocks back and forth and the lights flicker once. His ghost must be sleepy; he’d have expected a little more venom in that response. Either that or he’s just as excited as David to figure out a better way to communicate. 

“So. What's your name?” he asks. 

There's a pause and then the word **JON** is traced out in solid capitals in the condensation. Another pause and then **athan** is tacked to the end, slightly smaller letters to fit on the mirror. 

Jonathan. Alright. David nods to himself and tries to catch his breath. His ghost is named Jonathan. 

“I'm David,” he says, and then laughs at the sarcastic series of knocks that brings. “I'm trying to be _polite_ , asshole! Roommates introduce each other!” 

There's a pause and then…

 **roommates?** traced out slowly below Jonathan's name. 

“Sure,” David says, almost goes on to say _we are living together, apparently_ before he realizes the phrasing might be insensitive. “We're, you know, both occupying the same apartment. Roommates.” 

A sharp knock, an agreement, and then silence. It's kind of a tense silence. A waiting silence. A silence filled by the sound of the shower hissing down. 

“Wait,” David realizes in a moment of creeping horror, “you haven't been watching me in the shower, have you?”

A flurry of loud knocks, such an obvious sharp protestation, and David bursts out laughing. It's a little jagged with something a lot like relief.

-[]-

David gets pretty good at telling when Jon is around. There’s a way he fills up a room without David being able to see it. A taste to the air or something. The hairs on David’s arms standing at attention, the prickle of eyes on the back of David’s neck. It’s less uncomfortable than it sounds when he tries to articulate it in his head.

Jon’s just kind of… around. It’s not a big deal. 

It isn’t always. It’s most of the time, it turns out, but not always. Nearly always in the living room or kitchen, shadowing him as he cooks or turns on the Bachelorette. He seems to have strong opinions about the show, throwing papers around periodically, occasionally clicking the volume around when he really hates someone on it. 

He’s around less often in the bathroom, pretty much only when he’s following David to argue with him in the flicker of lights and the ruffle of his hair. 

He feels strongly about steak and the Bachelorette, and doesn’t seem to give a shit about movies except for preferring them loud and colorful and fun. David runs the shower while he brushes his teeth and laughs at Jon filling his mirror up with swearing. He doesn’t venture into David’s bedroom much. Never when David’s awake. 

David doesn’t ask about it because he likes his bedroom activities to be _private_ , thank you. 

It works for them.

-[]-

“So I am meeting this ghost, yes?” Flower yanks open the shower curtain to ask and David yelps and nearly slips on the slick tiles and breaks his ass.

“I’m naked,” he snaps at Flower. Flower rolls his eyes. 

“I have seen one before,” he says and grabs at his own crotch. David looks up at the ceiling. 

“I didn’t have to skate practice with you assholes,” he tells the ugly ceiling tiles. “I could have stayed in the PT room with the nice trainers, they’ve never grabbed their dicks at me.” 

“You treasure me,” Flower reminds him and finally allows him to pull the shower curtain back across. “It was no-contact anyway, you were barely there! I want to meet the ghost!” 

“Fuck _off_ ,” David calls back and waits for Flower’s footsteps to recede before he grabs his soap.

-[]-

“Jon,” David calls as soon as he’s got the door open and his bag in a heap in the entryway. “Jon, Flower’s here!”

There’s a faint knock and then quiet. Flower follows him in and looks around, quick and curious. 

Silence, for a long moment. 

“You're gonna embarrass me in front of Flower,” David calls and has to laugh when that's what gets the kitchenware rattling.

Flower is staring with bright, starry eyes when David turns to him. 

“His name’s Jon,” he says, and grins when a breeze that shouldn’t be runs through his hair. “He’s pretty great.” 

It takes all of about ten minutes to get Flower and Jon bickering like they’ve been friends for years. 

He’s not as good as David is at telling when Jon is there, takes a few seconds to process what Jon is trying to say when he tips over a cup or ruffles the pages of the Sports Illustrated laid out on the coffee table. David is selfishly glad of it, and happy about the way Jon keeps ruffling at his hair or shirt. 

He thinks Jon might be a little nervous. 

“This is the worst,” Flower says and throws himself down dramatically onto the couch next to where David’s been quietly working his way towards wasted, one methodical beer at a time. “You can just tell he wants to talk more but he just can’t, how do you handle it?” 

“Oh,” David says, and grins, and he’s drunk so that’s why he tells Flower what he says next. “We figured out a pretty sweet way around that.” 

The look Flower gives him when he pulls him to the bathroom and starts up the shower as hot as it’ll go speaks volumes. A whole encyclopedia, in fact. One of the ones with a lot of volumes and tiny fonts. David ignores him and leans against the wall to sip his beer until the mirror is fogged enough. 

“There,” he says when it is, inordinately proud. “Say hi, Jon!” 

It occurs to him belatedly that Jon might decide to fuck with him, to not do anything at all. He has a brief moment to panic before Jon knocks against the wall and then shaky letters are being drawn in the mirror’s fog. 

**bonjour** , they say. 

Flower stares at them, and then turns to stare at David, and then turns to look back at the letters. David grins at him and finishes his beer and just kind of- lets the empty bottle fall from his fingers. It’s fine, he totally lives here. 

“Cool, huh?” he asks and preens a little. 

Flower looks back at him. 

“Has he just been running a hot shower whenever you want to talk?” Flower demands. 

A knock on the door, hesitant, singular. David flushes and scowls at Flower when Flower looks at him in absolutely hypocritical disgust. 

“He's an idiot,” Flower says. 

There's a flurry of knocks and then **NON** drawn in shaky letters on the mirror. 

“You're an idiot too,” Flower adds, because he apparently _doesn't care_ if David's ghost wants to murder him. Not that David is entirely sure Jon is capable of it, but the ghost has a temper and there’s a lot of glass in this bathroom. He edges as far out of the potential shrapnel radius as he can. 

The lights flicker. Flower puts his hands on his hips and raises his eyebrows. 

“It’s wasteful,” he says, as if he gives a shit about waste. 

The lights stop flickering. A moment later, another knock. It manages to sound a little sheepish. 

“Alright,” Flower says and points unerringly into midair, as if he can tell where Jon is too. David frowns at him and teeters in a little closer. “You two deserve each other. Figure out a better way!” 

Flower’s made it past David and halfway down the hallway before Jon summons another sheepish knock. David can sympathize. It’s a pretty common reaction to full frontal Fleury.

-[]-

It worries David when Jon hasn’t visibly fucked with anything in a while.

The air conditioner has been kicking out a perfect temperature for weeks now and the kitchen is usually alright, but David can’t keep track of his keys if he puts them down and Jon seems to take some kind of unholy glee in turning things upside down. All of his cups, all of the food in the fridge. 

He can’t seem to keep milk unspoiled in the house either. He’s given up on having a nice bowl of cereal for the foreseeable future. 

Increasingly he’s sure Jon is up to something, but he can’t exactly _ask_ , and even if he did ask he’s pretty sure Jon would just refuse to answer. Perils of an invisible and incorporeal roommate, David supposes

-[]-

“No,” David says and he’s nearly sobbing with laughter, seriously, there are actual tears on his cheeks, Jesus. “No, no, _no_.”

A flurry of knocks against the door by his head and David descends back into helpless laughter. His stomach hurts. His cheeks hurt. He’s pretty sure he’s got tear tracks permanently etched onto his cheeks. _How is Jon trying to cheat at tic-tac-toe?_

“No, like,” he manages and draws another tic-tac-toe board on the dwindling foggy mirror real estate. Jon instantly fills three spaces with o’s. 

David is perched on the bathroom counter by dint of a chair he’d dragged from the dining room table and an amount of whiskey he doesn’t think needs to be contemplated. There’s more whiskey in the cup at his elbow, sippable and dangerous. The whole situation is precarious but hasn’t failed him yet. It probably won’t, at least until he’s drunk enough not to feel it until the next morning. 

“You _cheater_ ,” David says and smacks a hand carefully down on the counter where it won’t knock over his whiskey. Jon knocks back at him, very obviously sarcastic. Jon squints in the direction of where he probably is. 

“You’re just scared I’ll win if you play by the rules,” he hisses and gets his cup up to his mouth for another sip. 

There’s a pause and then Jon drumming out a steady, slow beat on the wall. _It’s fucking_ on, _bitch_. David grins and draws another board.

-[]-

David is in the middle of a perfectly good novel.

It’s a really good one, there’s romance and intrigue and lots of mentions of heaving bosoms, which gets it full marks from David. Lord Peverly had gotten stabbed a chapter ago and rushed off to the infirmary. The other characters have all gotten down to mourning and the dastardly Count has rushed Lady Emilia to the altar, but David’s pretty sure Peverly is going to show up in a few pages to stop them. 

“You have terrible taste,” an echoey voice says, right by his ear, and David screams and throws his book across the room. 

He falls out of the couch in his rush to turn and see who’d spoken, and the book has knocked over the sticks he’d left to lean in the corner, and there’s laughter coming echoing and kind of horrible from the empty space next to where David had been sitting. 

There’s no one there. No one David can see, anyway, and-

“Jon?” he demands, panting, and then “ _Jonathan_ ,” when the laughter continues. 

“...my name,” echoes back at him. It’s kind of echoey, indistinct and on the edge of hearing. It also sounds incredibly mocking. Jon, David reflects with something that’s mostly admiration, is kind of an incredible asshole. 

“Did I know you could do that?” he demands and a frigid gust of air ruffles his hair. It feels like it might be teasing. 

“Practiced,” Jon says faintly. His voice is fading, receding off into some immeasurable distance. David squints. “...Wanted... fuck with you...” 

The last word is barely a whisper, just a swell of static over the sound of the air conditioner.

“You’re a dick,” David tells him meanly and Jon knocks on the wall. David’s pretty sure he’s laughing at him. 

He’s also pretty sure Jon had an accent. He’s pretty sure it’d been lilting, vaguely slurred. He’s pretty damn sure that it had been Québécois.

-[]-

“My ghost talked to me,” he informs Reaves, adjusting his sock tape. He catches Reaves looking at him out of the corner of his eye and grins to himself.

“Did it tell you you’re going to lose at face-offs today?” he says pleasantly and David squawks at him and throws a glove. 

“He told me you’re a dick,” he calls and makes sure to beat Reaves by at least double in the drills.

-[]-

“I think Jon is from Quebec,” he tells Flower, and Flower frowns at him skeptically.

“In Vegas?” he asks.

“Everything's possible in Vegas,” David quotes at him and Flower nods along.

-[]-

It turns out to be harder to watch the Bachelorette in peace when Jon can actually articulate what he hates about every single contestant.

“He’s got the ugliest hair,” he murmurs viciously in David’s ear, and David’s gotten to be depressingly good at not reacting to echoey ghostly voices materializing in his ear without warning. If he weren’t certain he isn’t crazy, this would make him question it. “She deserves better than that douchebag.” 

David glances at the dude over his phone. He’s gearing up to get back off IR, he’s already skated practice a few times, and as a result he can’t stop checking scores like he’s obsessed. 

“His hair looks fine, dumbass,” he says and looks back down at his phone. The Canadiens are fucking themselves so hard it’s kind of hilarious, which is always heartening to see. “It’s his shirt.” 

There’s a considering noise in his ear, a ruffle of a breeze across his shoulder. 

“You’re not wrong,” Jon says at last. “He’s ugly.” 

“Shut up and tell me if it looks like she’s gonna make the wrong choice,” David answers and queues a game highlights video up.

-[]-

Sometimes David thinks he catches glimpses of things out of the corners of his eyes. Not like, the kind of things he’d want to take to a trainer. Just, every once in a while he catches a glimpse of a shadow where there shouldn’t be one, or movement that isn’t there when he turns to look at it full on. It startles him sometimes, makes him jump and drop things, but it’s never anything at all.

It only happens in his apartment, only happens when he’s tired and Jon’s been quiet all day. He’s not entirely sure if he’s imagining it or not, isn’t sure if he’s maybe going a little crazy. It doesn’t bother him much.

-[]-

They win the first game he gets to skate in and he comes home absolutely out of his mind with exhaustion and victory and shouts to Jon about it, rapid French and English blurring together. He’s trying to give a play-by-play, kind of, even thought he’d left the TV on and he’s pretty sure Jon had watched the game because he’s scoffing at every turn. It’s familiar, Jon laughing at him.

He sounds fond. He sounds happy for David, in his own way. David’s pretty sure they’re friends.

-[]-

“-and then, _boom_ , like the fist of fucking _God_ ,” Subban is telling the table enthusiastically.

“We’ve all gotten boarded by Chara before,” Smith says, gesturing expansively and looking vaguely superior despite the way he’s sloshing beer all over himself. Engelland is sitting next to him, trapped between the localized beer disaster and the wall and looking like he’d much rather be elsewhere. 

“Sure, but everyone’s expecting it from Chara,” Eaks puts in from Smith’s other side. He’s got a little line of shot glasses in front of him and doesn’t look too bothered by the beer splashback. David’s not entirely sure he’s even noticed, he’s swaying in place a little bit and keeps blinking slowly. “You get it from, like, Benn? That shit is fucked up.” 

“It’s a fucking religious experience is what I’m saying-,” Subban declares and Flower’s laughing right in David’s ear like a fucking asshole. 

“But Benn,” Eaks interrupts, and Smith bangs his glass on the table. It’s empty now at least. Engelland looks vaguely relieved. 

“You’re from fucking _Manitoba_ , shut up,” he says derisively and then the whole table goes up in an argument about the provinces that David knows from generous experience is going to take up the rest of the night and maybe end in a fight in the parking lot. Flower is still laughing in David’s ear, piping up just to throw in for Quebec, and David settles back against the bench and grins up at the ceiling.

-[]-

David shows up in the locker room and his stall is stacked at least 8 boxes high with various brands of ouija board. He stares at them for a long time and the someone in the locker room stifles a snicker very poorly.

He picks one up and examines the Hasbro brand label. 

“Thanks,” he says dryly to the room at large and isn’t at all surprised when Flower winks at him.

-[]-

The charity events, that evergreen NHL staple, are at least a little more fun in Vegas. Most of them involve the opportunity to get quietly shitfaced, at least. Some of them involve gambling. Some of them even involve pool parties, which is a novelty David sincerely hopes never loses its shine.

This one isn’t a pool party but David is pleasantly buzzed and it’s barely evening, and they’ve already made something over a couple thousand for a cancer charity he feels vaguely bad for not remembering the name of. 

In his defense, beer. 

“Look,” Nealer mumbles in his ear and points across the casino floor. David looks, and then snorts into his beer. 

Flower is at the center of a whirlwind of people, dealing cards and scintillating grins with abandon. He is also already spectacularly wasted, though hiding it well. There's a cup at his elbow half-full of something blue and probably venomously alcoholic, and his eyes are the special kind of glazed and unfocused, but his hands are unerring dealing the cards. 

“Shit,” David says admiringly. “Should we bail him?” 

Nealer shrugs. 

“Deryk’s on babysitting duty right now,” he says and points in possibly the least discrete show of subtlety David has ever seen at Engelland lurking at Flower's shoulder. “Flower’s gotta be here for the whole event. ‘Sides, you know what Flower always says. Ball ‘til you fall.” 

“He's literally never said that,” David says and chugs his beer and is abjectly grateful he's not the face of this franchise and can probably sneak out before midnight. 

He's gotten Jon hooked on Extreme Home Makeover, and the way Jon makes fun of literally every single room in the final reveals is much more fun than stilted conversation with tipsy older women. 

“Whatever that is in French-Canadian, then,” Nealer says in his ear.

-[]-

“I want to show you something,” Jon says, and David looks.

There’s something in the middle of the room, dim and uneven. A shadow, a shadow David vaguely recognizes because he’s been… he’s been seeing it out of the corner of his eye for weeks. A shape like a pillar of shadow, a vague silhouette. 

Jon fades into view in a series of impressions. The curve of a shoulder and the smear of his face, light against the shadows of the room. It takes David probably a little too long to even realize Jon’s more or less totally visible. Jon shifting like he’s shuffling his feet is what does it, even though David is pretty sure he doesn’t have feet. 

He blinks and shakes his head and takes his first good look at Jon. 

A bunch of things occur to him at once. _I didn't think you'd be so cute,_ for one thing. _Do you realize your eyes kind of glow because I don’t think I’m imagining that_ , also. _I can see straight through you,_ most pressingly. 

“You're short,” is what ends up winning out. 

Jon gapes at him. 

“I'm a _ghost_ ,” he chokes out at last. 

“A short one,” David agrees. 

Jon scowls and he’s flickering kind of, like a bad home movie or a heat mirage. David stares at him in absolute fascination and like, honestly? If this is how he dies, death by pissed off ghost shrapnel because David’s too fucking stupid and slow to dodge out of the way, then so be it. 

“I practiced for this,” Jon says belligerently, and he’s still flickering like a shitty stop-motion film. “Fuck you.” 

David can’t tear his eyes away. Jon really is cute, he thinks, which is kind of maybe a fucked up thought to have about a dead person. It’s possible the boat of not being fucked up sailed long ago. Possibly when he moved into the apartment occupied by a ghost. David suspects that’s when he really went astray. 

“You’re incredible,” he says softly. 

Jon is incredible. He’s compact, little, and glares with the force of a million malevolent suns. David can kind of make out the dark brown of his hair, the shocking blue of his eyes. He can see the walls through him but when he scoffs and tosses his head it’s weirdly fluid, so natural. It’s difficult to pinpoint his pupils still but David’s pretty sure Jon just rolled his eyes. 

“You’re insane,” Jon replies. 

“Well,” David agrees. “Obviously.”

-[]-

The first time Jon smiles at him is enough to give him nightmares.

“You looked like a serial killer,” David tells him, stupidly delighted, and Jon scowls at him even harder. “No, I’m serious, how do you get your face to do that?” 

“I don’t have a face,” Jon says pissily because he doesn’t want to admit his smile is a horrible atrocity to God that would make small children cry. His teeth are horrifically white and it feels like there’s a few too many of them. There’s something about it that makes Jon look completely dead inside too, which is a thought that makes David choke on a laugh with the irony. 

“No, I’m serious,” David insists and he’s pretty sure he’s about to start laughing so hard he’ll cry. “Your face, your _smile_.” 

Jon bares his teeth at him in something that’s decidedly a snarl and _somehow_ has more emotion to it than his supposedly sincere smile had. He looks the most solid he ever has, David can barely see his couch through him, which might be the result of Jon’s blind murderous rage but is still pretty cool. 

David starts laughing and can’t calm down until a tear streaks down his cheek.

-[]-

“How’s your possessed apartment coming?” Reaves asks and David shrugs.

“We’re friends now, I think,” he says, and he’s even pretty sure that’s true.

-[]-

Jon watches TV like it's his day job. David starts getting used to coming home to the TV on, tuned to something that seems to have no rhyme or reason. A rerun of the 2016 U.S. Open, something trite and utterly addictive on HGTV. Food Network or an infomercial, volume on a tick too low until David pokes at the remote. He never sees Jon touch the remote but the channel sometimes clicks around when he isn’t looking.

Jon seems to like hovering in some facsimile of curled up in the corner of the couch David usually occupies. That’s where David finds him as often as not, a bundle of vague shapes and the pale smear of his face with its blue lantern eyes. 

He fades into view a little more when he catches David looking, a little more cheekbone and a little less impressionist watercolor. He doesn’t always smile, doesn’t always say hi, but he always seems to know when David’s looking. 

“How did you even entertain yourself before I brought my TV around?” David demands, laughing, and Jon grins at him with his truly terrible serial killer grin.

“Don't remember,” he says, casual as fuck, and the wind goes out of David so abruptly he nearly chokes. 

“Huh,” he says weakly. It's lucky Jon's already moved on to ignoring him in favor of mumbling vile aspersions about the Bachelorette, because David doesn't know what he could possibly say.

-[]-

He wouldn’t say he thinks about it all the time. The Knights are girding up for a playoffs push and he’s fucking exhausted even when he isn’t riding the awful, essential surge and wane of adrenaline that is their brutal game schedule. There’s training, practice, media. Keeping himself going because if inertia fails then so might he.

It’s just that there’s a lot of travel time involved. There’s a lot of time to himself, time to think, time where shitty YouTube videos and audiobooks don’t cut it to keep his thoughts in line. 

He wonders, about Jon.

-[]-

“I can stay out of the way,” Jon says, and David can practically hear the stubborn way he’s set his jaw even if he can’t see it. He rolls his eyes and doesn’t bother looking up from the peppers he’s stir-frying.

“Fuck off,” he says lazily. “Of course he’ll want to meet you.” 

Jon doesn’t argue more than that. He looks kind of pleased when Jon glances at him. David rolls his eyes and turns back to his stir fry. It figures that his ghost would be dramatic. 

He spends the rest of the time before Reaves is supposed to arrive being an absolute asshole, moving the spices out of David’s reach and threatening to - but not actually - fiddling with the temperature of the stove. David shouts and whacks at the air in his direction with the spoon and- 

He’s having a great time. He’s almost disappointed when Reaves knocks on his door. 

“Hello, hello,” Reaves chirps at him and shoves right by as soon as David cracks open the door. “So, you have a ghost?” 

He doesn’t make even a show of not looking around curiously, peering in every direction like he’s expecting ectoplasm dripping from the walls like some cut price Ghostbusters rip off, or something out of Paranormal Activity. There isn’t anything, of course, because David likes to think of himself as a tidy and clean person. 

Reaves keeps peeking around anyway. David rolls his eyes and follows him down the entry hall to the living room. 

Jon is exactly where David had left him, the vague form of a short Québécois man, flickering like he’d just stepped out of a movie from the fucking 1920’s. 

Reaves drops the sixer he’d been carrying right onto the living room carpet. 

David eyes the cans until he’s sure they’re not going to explode and then nudges Reaves out of the way to get them into the fridge. He leaves Jon and Reaves to their staring contest until he’s checked on the chicken, gotten himself a beer that hasn't been dropped on the floor, and come back to find Reaves and Jon still frozen in place. 

“You’re acting like you’ve never seen a ghost before,” he observes and Reaves turns to him with an expression like David had just told him the Flyers were in the finals. 

“Pear,” Reaves manages and he sounds so squeaky David inhales beer and chokes on it. 

“I _told_ you,” he coughs, half the beer in his lungs and half laughter at the way Reaves’ head is bouncing back and forth like he can’t choose whether to stare at Jon or David. 

“I thought you were joking!” Reaves squawks at him and David thinks he's probably never going to stop laughing. 

Jon’s leaning up against midair, smirking in that smug way David would normal chirp him for but right now can't exactly argue with. Reaves is staring at him like he can't believe what he's seeing, which is probably fair, because Jon’s not really putting a lot of effort into being opaque or hovering closer to the ground. 

“I told you my apartment was haunted,” he chokes out between snickers, spreads his hands in as sincere a gesture as he can. He's working to catch his breath but it's hard when Reaves’ face keeps setting him off again. 

“You told me you had a _ghost_ , Pear!” Reaves snaps at him. He can't look away from Jon. “I just thought you caught whatever Flower has!” 

“Being a goalie isn't contagious,” David tells him.

Jon grins his incredibly horrible grin and Reaves flinches. David dips to rattle around in his drawers for plates so Reaves won't see him laughing. 

“You were gonna have dinner,” Jon says, and his voice is echoing a lot more than it has to. It’s entirely on purpose, David decides. His ghost is such a dick. “Don’t let me keep you.”

-[]-

“So do you think you could get a keyboard to work?” David asks conversationally and Jon stares at him narrowly.

“You’re planning something,” he concludes, and David grins. This is how Flower must feel all the time, he thinks. No wonder he is the way he is. It’s heady as shit. 

“I am not,” he asserts and Jon’s eyes narrow into little fiery slits. He looks constipated. It’s fucking amazing. David can’t stop grinning. 

“You’re planning something!” Jon hisses at last and his whole outline flares. 

“Nothing _bad_ ,” he promises. “Just, like, do you think you can?” 

Jon stares at him. He stares back. 

“I just thought you’d get lonely, I have a big roadie coming up,” David coaxes. He does, and he genuinely does have Jon’s interests at heart. If his interests go hand in hand with seeing what Jon does with his browsing history, then, well. That’s just good sense. “I could set up my laptop for you.” 

Jon spends way too long just staring at him. David doesn’t bothering trying to hold a staring contest; he knows when he’s outmatched, and he’s not going to try to out-stare something he's pretty sure only blinks out of habit. 

“I think I could,” Jon says at last, reluctant, and David can’t stop the big grin that breaks across his face. “Worth a try.”

-[]-

He leaves his laptop on the coffee table, charger attached and a wired mouse he’d needed to visit a used electronics store to find plugged in. He demonstrates the mechanics of turning it on and off and the rudiments of the operating system to Jon and then leaves him to it.

The first email he receives from vgkghost666@gmail.com comes the morning after an OT win that feels like it had been scraped out of David's own body. He's fucking exhausted, but the email address Jon picked out makes him smile anyway. 

It has the subject line **xqedjtd**. The body text reads _ur team sux . do bettr_.

-[]-

He’s drunk, which is the best excuse he has even if it isn’t a good one. There’s a row of beers in front of him, because they have a homestead and a three day gap between games and sometimes, sometimes a man needs to get wasted in the comfort of his own home and in the company of his apartment ghost.

So, yes, he’s a little on the side of completely smashed, but his door is locked and his phone is out of reach and the skate tomorrow morning is optional. He’s made significantly worse decisions. 

Jon laughs at him, like he always does. 

“I’m not getting you Advil tomorrow,” he chirps and David flaps a languid hand at him. He totally will; Jon is the softest of softies underneath it all, David is so sure. 

Jon squints at him. David grins back, expansive and sloshed and absolutely magnanimous. Jon rolls his eyes, a flicker of blue fire. 

“I _won’t_.” He totally will. 

“Alright,” David says peaceably and slouches deeper into the couch. His pulse is thrumming nicely and the couch upholstery feels really nice when he rubs his cheek against it. The Bachelorette is playing on the TV, down low so that the words are all running together. David isn’t totally sure why Jon hasn’t sneakily changed the channel on him yet, he’s made his opinion on the contestants this season pretty clear. 

Silence falls and David cracks another beer. 

“Do you remember much?” he asks before he realizes that’s probably insensitive. 

He takes a sip of beer to occupy his mouth before he can ask any more stupid shit. He has a lot of dumb questions, little things. They’re almost definitely way too rude to ask, even if they are driving him a little crazy. 

Jon looks pensive. The edge of him are flickering a little, a stutter that's vaguely mesmerizing. David doesn't bother trying not to look. It reminds him of a campfire. 

“Not really,” he answers at last. “I can remember some things, general outlines, but like… The specific stuff, it's hard. I get lost.” 

David nods and gulps more beer and wonders desperately if stuffing a couple knuckles in his mouth will keep himself from putting his foot in it. It seems like it might do the trick, except that Jon is turning his piercing gaze on him and David’s gotten pretty slick at reading him but he’s flickering, flickering, and it’s difficult to make out the details of his face. 

“Not a big deal,” he says, and his voice echoes like it does sometimes. Like he’s talking from the other end of the tunnel onto the ice. 

David’s pretty sure he means that David shouldn’t be asking questions. 

“Sure, hell yeah,” he says, waves a hand to brush it all away. “So, fuck this season, right?”

-[]-

“What's that?” Jon asks, hovering at David's shoulder. David looks down at the game he's putting into the PS3 in confusion.

“Uh,” he says. “It's, um, a PlayStation? It's a game system-,”

“No, idiot,” Jon interrupts him with a tone of irritable disdain that makes David snort every time. “I know that, I haven't been dead that long. I mean the game.” 

“Oh!” David says and grins and files _haven't been dead that long_ away to consider much later. “Fortnite.”

Jon’s eyes narrow, a guttering flicker. 

“Sounds stupid,” he says.

-[]-

“On your left,” Jon shouts in his ear, “your left! Your _left_ \- oh, fucking nice going, right into that guy.”

“Shut up, shut up,” David chants back, leaning with the movement of his character, and he's grinning like a fool because he hasn't had this much fun playing a game in ages.

-[]-

“I want to introduce Jon to more of the guys,” he tells Flower, because Flower is great at things like introducing people to the team. “It's cool having you two around and, you know, he's cool. It would be good for him to have more friends.”

Flower’s looking at him when he glances over, expression totally unreadable which never bodes well, but then he just shrugs. 

“Karlsson first,” is all he says.

“Karlsson?” David asks, surprised. He would have expected Engelland or maybe Nealer. 

“It's Karlsson!” Flower says, which could mean any number of things, all of them true. 

“Well,” David says, “alright.” 

Because, well, alright.

-[]-

Bill is totally game to see the elusive apartment ghost.

He doesn’t _believe_ David, which he’s gotten better at picking up on. None of the guys that haven’t yet met Jon believe that David really does have a haunted apartment and a Québécois ghost. Which, whatever. Their loss. Jon is fucking great. 

Jon is also, David realizes when he brings Bill and Flower home for dinner and finds all the chairs around his dining room table upside down, a massive dick with a terrible sense of humor. 

“Could you guys,” he sighs and gestures at the chairs, ignoring the way Flower’s laughing at him as he turns into the kitchen to put the steaks he’d defrosted carefully that morning on the stove. Flower at least knows all about Jon’s sense of humor. They’re a lot alike. 

Bill follows Flower into David's living room. 

“Wow, you're real,” echoes back to the kitchen, a distinctly Swedish accent. Bill sounds calm, which means he's probably making big freaked out eyes at Flower right now. David grins and starts pulling out silverware. 

Jon says something indistinct, accented English clipped sharply by sarcasm. 

“You're really short,” David hears and glances up in time to catch the warning crackle of static electricity and the lights flickering and dimming ominously. 

“Jon!” David calls, not bothering to turn away from the steaks sizzling on the stove. “Don't explode my lights!” 

A pause, and then another, more sullen flicker and the lights brighten back up. 

“Your friend is a dick,” Jon calls back in sulky French, and David laughs at him. 

“You _are_ short,” he replies, English for Karlsson’s benefit, and flips the steaks. “Don’t explode my light bulbs just ‘cause you can’t handle the truth.” 

There’s a pause and then an exclamation of Swedish surprise that makes David grin. 

“Pear, your ghost just vanished,” Flower tells him from the kitchen doorway. He doesn’t sound as panicked as the stream of Scandinavian profanity coming from the living room. Honestly, he just sounds amused. “Please reassure Karlsson before he passes out.” 

“He’s sulking,” David says and he’s fully aware of how fond the grin he gives the stove is. Much more fond than a trio of overpriced steaks deserve, anyway. “Leave him alone until he feels better. How do you like your steak done?” 

Jon fades into view seated more or less on the spare chair, halfway through dinner. Karlsson jumps and swears at him and Flower nods amicably and Jon grins his bizarrely awful shiny grin at them all and David smiles down into the pile of romaine he’d managed to pass off as salad because Flower hadn’t cared enough to make fun of him for it. It could honestly have gone so much worse.

-[]-

“Please don’t freak out,” Jon says and David is already scanning the room before the words have even cleared the air.

“What did you do?” he demands. Everything _looks_ normal, and Jon has mostly graduated from just moving things around so David can’t find them. He suspects because he’s gotten too used to it for a good reaction and there aren’t enough good hiding places. 

Jon sort of flickers, which David has come to interpret as shuffling his feet awkwardly. 

“Before you freak out,” he says, and holds up his hands. David glares. “I genuinely had nothing to do with this, okay?” 

“What is it?” David demands and realizes he’s clutching his duffle to his chest like it’s a handbag and he’s a scandalized maiden aunt. He sets it down on what he hopes is a clear patch of floor. It doesn’t look like there’s anything wrong with it, anyway. Jon doesn’t meet his eyes but he does gesture towards the kitchen. 

“It’s in here,” he says, and conducts them around the island counter. 

There’s a little grey lizard square in the middle of David’s floor. 

It’s about the length of David’s hand and mottled like the Vegas desert, a beige-y tan grey that manages to both stand out against his linoleum tile and also be deeply threatening. It doesn’t have spines, visibly at least, but he’s pretty damn sure it has teeth. He’s pretty certain reptiles have teeth. This one probably does. 

The lizard meets his eyes squarely. Aggressively, even. 

David sucks in a breath and Jon jigs in place, a flickering sort of movement. 

“ _Don’t_ freak out,” he hisses and David holds the breath he’d meant to be a scream in for a moment longer before he lets it hiss back out. 

“I’m not freaking out!” he says, and his voice is like a little squeakier than he likes but like, that’s fine! “Who’s freaking out!” 

“You are!” Jon accuses, which is fine for _Jon_ because he’s incorporeal and can’t get bitten by this _venomous reptile_ that is _invading David’s home_. David would turn to tell him so but that would mean removing his gaze from the lizard, and then there’s no telling where it could end up. 

“I am not,” David snaps, but he isn’t paying attention to his own words anymore. He’s trying frantically to think of how to get the scaly monster out of his home. He’s kind of tempted to call the cops but he thinks they’d probably laugh at him. Flower and Engelland certainly would when they inevitably somehow found out, and that would be even worse than death by lizard bite. 

“I think you can get a bowl on top of it,” Jon says, and he’s leaning over David’s shoulder now. “Pretty sure. Then you can move it?” 

David hesitates. 

“That won’t hurt it?” he asks at last, because the lizard might be menacing him unprovoked but he’s pretty sure it’s native to Las Vegas and David sure isn’t. 

Jon glares at him. 

“Of _course_ not,” he snaps like he's offended David even thought he'd suggest something that would hurt the lizard, and David huffs a sigh. 

“Let’s do it, then.”

-[]-

It’s kind of insultingly easy in the end.

Jon gets to watch David sneak a plastic mixing bowl over the lizard, unsteady and barely managing to keep his grip until he can drop it right over the top of it. After that it’s pretty easy to slide a piece of cardboard carefully under it and get the whole thing out into the courtyard. The lizard scuttles away as soon as David carefully knocks the bowl aside and he waves up at his window. Hopefully Jon could see how brave he was being. 

“You looked like an idiot,” Jon says as soon as David gets the door open. “And you left the bowl in the courtyard.”

-[]-

“You’re coming out to drinks with us,” Reaves tells him, and Flower’s standing at his shoulder smiling like an extremely friendly French-Canadian puma. David isn’t enough of an idiot to think he has a choice in the matter.

“Let me shower first,” he says hopelessly and starts stripping out of his pads faster. 

‘Out to drinks’ turns out to be drinking on Reaves’ patio, afternoon sun slanting down a few feet from them. It’s cool enough for hoodies but David is kind of sweating anyway. 

Reaves and Flower haven’t said anything yet. Nothing to explain why he’s been kidnapped, at least, just idle conversation about games and the conferences and how much it kind of sucks that there’s nowhere decent to go fishing in the area. He’s waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

“I think the Pens really have it this year,” Reaves concludes and Flower and David both lift their beers to toast that. They’re going to crush them in the playoffs, but old team loyalties die hard. 

Silence falls and David sips his beer in peace. 

“You’re not allowed to fuck the ghost,” Flower says, apropos of absolutely fucking nothing. David almost drops his beer bottle. 

“I'm not fucking the ghost!” he squawks. “I _can't_ fuck the ghost!” 

“Is that the only reason you're not fucking the ghost?” Reaves asks, and David puts his face into his hands. “Because like, I'm accepting and shit, it's okay if you want to even though you can't.”

David truly, honestly can’t think of anything to say in response and so he just kind of screams quietly into his hands. He’s abruptly so glad they’re not in public, not that he thinks anyone in the press would _believe_ his apartment is haunted. He just doesn’t really want the reputation that this conversation making it onto Deadspin would entail. He hates his fucking teammates. 

Flower pats his shoulder. 

“It’ll just make it harder on you,” he says, which doesn’t make an ounce of sense. David doesn’t lift his head from his hands. He’s always thought Flower was the exception to the _goalies are fucking crazy_ rule but apparently not. 

He pulls his head up at last. Flower and Reaves are both looking at him like they know something he doesn’t, pitying and vaguely superior. The absolute fuckers. 

“I have no idea what you’re talking about and this conversation is over,” he says with as much dignity as he can manage, and then promptly ruins it by adding, “I don’t want to fuck the ghost.” 

“Alright,” Flower says, cool and condescending, and David gives up and pours his beer in Flower’s lap.

-[]-

Jon is hovering a few inches above the couch when David gets home. Something David doesn’t recognize is playing on the TV, something colorful and distinctly American despite the volume down so low. It washes out Jon’s already indistinct outline until he’s just a jumble of shadows and a pair of eyes like lanterns.

He firms up when David kicks the door shut and toes off his shoes, becomes the shape of himself a little more, colors fading in. The temperature jumps a few degrees, warming against the cool of Vegas nighttime. He doesn’t say anything, but it feels like the whole room lights up a little bit in greeting. 

“‘Lo,” David croaks. 

“Hey,” Jon says, his familiar echoey voice and badly accented English. He smiles when David trips over his own shoelaces and David catches the horrible shiny thing out of the corner of his eye and just… 

Oh. 

Fucking Flower.

-[]-

The thing is, he thinks philosophically, face down in his pillow, that he actually really _can’t_ fuck Jon. Physically. So there’s that. He has that going for him.

Or against him. 

Fucking _Flower_.

-[]-

So it’s like, probably not a big deal.

He goes to practice and checks Flower into the boards, as is his God-given right, and then skates his heart out. He goes to lunch with Smith or goes to drinks with Karlsson or shoots the shit in a terrible pool hall with Reaves. He comes home and sits on the couch watching shitty television with Jon and then makes dinner for one, sniping back and forth with companionable and affectionate ruthlessness. 

It’s not a big deal, how nothing necessarily changes, but David still feels like the whole world has shifted and he suddenly can’t find his feet. The only time he feels at all settled these days is when there’s ice singing under his skates. 

Flower pulls him aside with an apologetic expression exactly one time, and David sticks his middle finger in his face. 

“You are a meddler and a dickhead,” he says, and Flower accepts that for the forgiveness it is. 

Jon doesn’t seem to notice anything any different, and David thanks every one of his lucky stars for small miracles. He doesn’t know how he’d be able to withstand the well-meaning if violent solicitations, if Jon suspected something were wrong.

-[]-

“Have you ever tried to leave the apartment?” he asks.

“Doesn’t work,” Jon says, and does the vanishing thing he does whenever he doesn’t want to deal with whatever it is that’s happening, and that is that about that as far as conversation goes for the rest of the evening.

-[]-

Bill brings Smith over.

“Reilly wanted to meet him,” he explains breezily and David sighs, because he had kind of been looking forward to a quiet day of watching the Bachelorette, but lets them in. They pile in like they own the place and David follows them as they start looking around his apartment, feeling vaguely put-upon.

Jon is nowhere to be found. David is kind of mystified and kind of grateful. 

“Sorry,” he says even though he isn't and shrugs at them. “Guess he’s not feeling it today. You guys can leave if you want.” 

“Oh, no worries,” Smith says and reaches into the bag David hadn’t thought to question and pulls out a familiar boxed ouija board set. The Hasbro logo shines up at him. “We came prepared.” 

They set it up in the living room and make David close the curtains and David knows neither of them are rookies but they’re both _acting_ like it. He grumbles at them but dutifully turns out the lights when they tell him to and puts his fingers on the planchette as well. He just knows Jon is watching this. 

“Spirit,” Smith intones and that’s as far as he gets before the planchette jerks under their hands and Bill makes a little squeaky noise David is going to chirp the shit out of him for later. 

Jon is, David realizes with admiration as the planchette jerks its way across the board, such a massive dick. 

“Oh, fuck,” Smith gulps, “That’s uh- M… U… R… Jesus, D?” 

“Murder,” Bill says faintly and that’s when the lights snap on all by themselves and Bill and Smith both scream and throw themselves in opposite directions. The ouija board goes flying and David’s coffee table gets knocked askew. Smith ends up behind the couch and Bill in the corner of the living room by the window. 

“ _Jon_ ,” David shouts, rubbing the bridge of his nose. He’s getting a headache and he really just wanted to watch the Bachelorette. “Apologize!” 

Jon manifests, bent over with laughter. David glares at him and tries not to let on how badly he wants to join in. Jon doesn’t need the encouragement. 

“Sorry, kid,” he says, nearly nice. Smith makes a warbling little noise. Bill sits down abruptly.

-[]-

“I want to meet your ghost,” Tuch says and David doesn’t need the faces Flower makes at him over Tuch’s shoulder to know he really doesn’t want that to happen.

“Uhh,” he manages. Tuch’s smiling in a way that promises nothing good. Reaves has joined in making worried faces over Tuch’s shoulder. 

“Bill and Smith said they got to meet it,” he says reasonably, and David can’t really argue with that. 

“He’s named Jon,” David says. “Uhh.” 

“I know where you live,” Tuch says, like that isn’t a horrifyingly creepy thing to say. “You can’t say you have a ghost and not show it off. I’ll just show up and throw things at your window.” 

“We were all gonna go over to his place and play some Call of Duty,” Reaves puts in, hustling around Tuch to throw an arm around David’s shoulder. Flower’s not far behind, grinning big and friendly. David smiles along gamely and tries to pretend like these were plans he’d known about all along. “You can come with, meet Jon.” 

“Really?” Tuch asks, frowning

No. “Sure,” David says hopelessly.

-[]-

David doesn’t like the way Tuch is eyeing Jon.

There’s none of the shock that Reaves had shown, none of Bill’s exaggerated hilarity. Definitely none of Flower’s immediate and aggressive antagonistic friend-making. He just stares, mouth thin, and doesn’t say anything. 

Jon doesn’t say anything either. He just hovers, doesn’t say a word. David doesn’t miss how there’s always someone between Tuch and him. He doesn’t miss how often that person is _him_. 

Flower and Reaves are both doing their best to fill the silence and make things less horrifyingly awkward. It isn't making much of a difference but David resolves to make it up to them later. Tuch won’t look away long enough to agree on the game to put in, had shrugged when Reaves had suggested ordering food. 

David is about to pull his hair out. He hates this kind of a lot, actually. 

“I’m kind of feeling Thai food,” Reaves is trying. They’ve gone in circles at least three times about it. David opens his mouth to put in for Chinese, because he knows Tuch hates Chinese food and he hopes that’ll get something out of Tuch that isn’t just staring. 

“Have you thought about trying to exorcise it?” Tuch interrupts, too loudly. 

The room goes absolutely quiet. 

For a moment David is expecting the lights to flicker, maybe an ominous door rattle. Jon lashing out, showing what he thinks of the suggestion. Nothing of the kind happens, though, just the heavy silence going kind of sick. No one seems to be breathing. 

He turns to Jon, hovering a little next to Reaves, except- 

He's barely there anymore. He's a shadow of what could be a human shape, barely more than a flicker of movement, and his brilliant blue eyes are dimming like they're about to go out. 

“Jesus, Tuch,” Reaves puts in, and it doesn't do a damn thing to break the tension. 

“What?” Tuch demands in answer and David can feel the words coming before they're even out of Tuch’s mouth. “It's not like the thing’s alive.”

Jon vanishes, fades from sight like a sigh. 

“Get out,” David says quietly. 

Tuch frowns at him and David discovers he’s on his feet. He doesn’t really remember deciding to do that and can’t really find it in himself to care. 

“What the fuck, dude,” Tuch demands and David points at the door. 

“Get the fuck out,” he says and congratulates himself on his self-control. 

He doesn’t drop gloves often but this feels like he has. Like he’s skating up the ice with violence pressing up against the back of his teeth. His skin feels too tight and he’s pretty sure he’s shaking, but he’s too angry to care. He’s pretty sure he’s about to deck Tuch if he sticks around one second longer than it takes to put his shoes on. 

Tuch swears at him but he goes, and neither Reaves nor Flower go to help. They just sit there, and that- that’s something. That means something. 

He hauls in a breath and tries to swallow down the blunt, thorny rage clawing around in his chest. 

“I’m going to look for him,” Flower says at last, and when David jolts to look at him he holds out a hand. “You need to calm down. Sit down.” 

David sits down. 

Reaves makes him have a glass of water, which makes David want to punch something all over again but does make him feel better by the time he’s finished it. They load up Call of Duty and don’t play it, and David stares down at his phone without really seeing it. Reaves is watching him, David can see him do it out of the corner of his eye. 

“I’m gonna piss,” he says shortly and Reaves wisely doesn’t say anything. 

He still doesn’t say anything when David doesn’t turn into the bathroom immediately. Reaves is a solid dude. 

The door to the guest bedroom is open. Flower's sitting on the bed and Jon is a jumble of shapes next to him, nearly overlapping. Practically cuddling, and that should be totally cool because it's _Flower_ and who hasn't wanted to cuddle Flower, but David finds himself biting his lip anyway. 

“It’s okay,” Flower murmurs, has been murmuring, and it reminds David with abrupt and hurting clarity of the locker room. A fucked play. A shitty shift. A bad game. 

He turns and walks back down the hall and plays a few half-hearted rounds of Call of Duty with Reaves until Flower comes back and Jon drifts in silently after him. No one says anything. David could almost believe things are alright.

-[]-

“I’m never inviting Tuch over again,” he promises as soon as Flower and Reaves have bowed out for the night. It’s past midnight and he’s a little punch-drunk with adrenaline, with stress, with how tired this season has him.

Jon’s still just a smeary flickering of shapes and colors. Nothing David can really resolve into a face, no hint of human expression. He thinks he sees Jon shrug, but he can’t be sure. 

“Okay,” Jon says, and even that is fading out.

David goes to bed feeling like he’s failed at something important, something he doesn’t even really know how to articulate.

-[]-

At practice Reaves checks Tuch into the boards so hard David can feel it in his skates and it doesn’t necessarily fix anything, but he feels better. The way Tuch can’t meet anyone’s eyes helps too.

-[]-

David gets checked into the boards in a fucking joke of a game against the Senators and banned from the next practice because the trainers hadn’t liked the way he’d winced when they’d jabbed their icy fingers into his ribs. He grumbles but dutifully takes an Advil and promises to lay around on the couch hydrating and by no means aggravating any lingering stress to his poor ribcage.

Jon had spent the first few hours of the morning mocking him for being an old man and then settled in to watch cartoons and make fun of the entire Metro division. David is so blessed, having a roommate that harbors the same perfectly reasonable and rational hatred that he does for every team in the division but the Pens. They can agree to disagree about the Pens. 

He resolutely doesn’t look too closely at the fuzzy projection hovering at the other end of the couch. He absolutely does not need to know about the soft relaxation on Jon’s face, the sleepy way he blinks despite not needing to blink at all. He doesn’t need to think about how endearing it is, and how he’s a total idiot. 

David winces and shuffles around awkwardly on the couch until his ribs twinge and he has to stop. He needs to distract himself. 

“You never did tell me why you fucked with me so much when I first moved in,” he says off-handedly and doesn’t realize it might be a loaded question until Jon _doesn’t_ immediately launch into a laundry list of David’s faults. 

There’s a pause and then Jon shrugs. 

He’s avoiding David’s eyes like only he can, blurring out until he looks like a badly rendered character in a shitty video game, all blocky shapes and no definition. His eyes are icy blue smears, blank and honestly kind of creepy. David’s pretty sure he’s doing it on purpose and also pretty sure he shouldn’t call him on it. 

“It was dark most of the time,” he says quietly. He sounds far away. “And then you were here moving in and- woke me up, I think. It was… I didn’t like it. Really disorienting. That’s why I kept, like, fucking with you. I wanted it to stop.” 

David sips his Gatorade to keep himself occupied. 

The instinct is there to apologize, which is kind of fucked up, but there it is. He’s not sure what he’s apologizing for because it’s not his fault that he needed a place to live, and it’s not his fault that Jon is a ghost, and it’s not his fault that he didn’t know the place he was going to live and the place Jon was laying around being a ghost in were the same place. 

Which, actually. 

“My fucking real estate agent didn’t tell me there was a ghost in my apartment,” he realizes, and Jon snaps back into focus with dizzy abruptness. He’s choking, a look on his face like he’d skated right into a cross-check while looking the other way. David’s intimately familiar. 

“She wouldn’t _know_ ,” Jon manages at last. He sounds a little strangled, and significantly less far away. “It’s not like I dumped _her_ pans all over the floor.” 

“Still,” David says darkly and chugs his Gatorade. Jon hadn’t met the lady. Incredibly nice and terrifyingly competent, and David is pretty sure she’d been able to see through walls.

-[]-

“I don’t mind you now,” Jon says abruptly as David is shuffling his sleepy way from the bathroom to the bedroom later that night.

David shrieks and jumps like he hasn’t since Jon first manifested and drops his cup of water all over the floor. 

“Jesus _Christ_ ,” he croaks and clutches at his chest. His ribs are twinging and his heart is going approximately seventy miles an hour and just, _Christ_. “Don’t sneak up on me!” 

“I was standing here the whole time,” Jon says sulkily but David’s pretty sure the pinched expression on his face is at least partially contrition. “You’re just unobservant.” 

“It doesn’t count if you’re invisible,” David snaps at him and bends creakily to retrieve his cup. The water on the floor is just not his problem right now. He’ll deal with it tomorrow. 

“Whatever,” Jon says and he’s scowling but not like he really means it. “Just listen.” 

“I’m listening,” David grumbles, edging around the puddle towards the bedroom. 

“I don’t mind you,” Jon says and David looks up involuntarily. Jon’s looking right at him, the frown faded back to just a tightness around eyes that shine and shine and shine. “Not anymore. You’re okay. It’s… nice having you around.” 

David opens his mouth like he thinks he has something to say and discovers his lungs are locked up tight and he has nothing to say at all. 

“So, yeah,” Jon says vaguely and sort of twists away back down the hall in the direction of the living room, a thread of color and movement and the impression of his back turned to David. The television turns on a moment later, canned laughter echoing quietly. David still can’t move, still can’t shut his mouth. 

He’d put his foot in the puddle, he realizes abstractly. It’s soaking right into his sock.

-[]-

He realizes, lying awake in bed with the television a dull murmur down the hall, that his problem hasn't gone away. It is in fact a pretty big problem, still. On the other hand, he resolves cheerfully, ignoring it entirely and refusing to deal with it at all has worked out okay so far.

He turns over, tucks his sheets over his shoulder, and goes to sleep.

-[]-

There’s a party to celebrate someone’s birthday, but it’s held at Flower’s because he’s the only one with his life together enough to have a house that can hold all of them and also is a good enough dude to let them throw a hockey birthday bash in his house. Flower, David has always known and upheld, is the best person in the world.

“You’re the best person in the fucking world,” he promises to Flower, who laughs at him and takes the empty beer from his hand and replaces it with a fresh one, and he was _saying_. Absolute best. 

“You say that to all the goalies,” Flower teases and David snorts. 

“Subban doesn’t need the encouragement,” he answers and Flower nods, and then Gangnam Style starts up over the speakers and both of them are groaning. 

They sip their beers in commiseration and watch the rush of men far past old enough to know better to the dancefloor to prove that they are still horrible adolescents at heart. 

“Wish Jon could be here,” Flower says, offhanded, and gestures out at the dancefloor atrocity Reaves is committing in the guise of Psy’s Gangnam Style dance. David's laughing ruefully and agreeing when the horrible little thought occurs to him that… Jon never will be able to be here. 

Never. Because he's dead. 

He hadn't exactly expected one of the worst moments of his life to involve someone in the background doing the sprinkler but it's kind of, he supposes, par for the course.

“No,” he says and he has no idea what his voice is doing. 

Flower looks at him sharply. David can’t meet his eyes. He can’t even look at him, can barely keep himself still. He kind of just wants to take off running. 

Abruptly he wants to be back at the rink, in a way he hasn’t for years. Since he was a little adolescent kid, confused by everything except hockey. Things make sense on the ice. He could control things. He knew what he was doing, when it came to hockey. He has no idea what he’s doing now. 

“Maybe Tuch had a point,” he says at last and his chest feels very hollow. 

“Tuch did _not_ have a point,” Flower says instantly. “Fuck him, David, listen.” 

“No, just,” David interrupts. His mouth is kind of numb but his chest is aching a little. Fuck. “He didn't… He didn't exactly ask to be, you know, like this.” 

“David,” Flower insists. David turns away to stare blindly at the pool, the kids splashing around in it, Vero laughing in the sunshine. Jon can’t have this. David’s pretty sure Jon can barely even remember having this, if he remembers it at all. Which isn’t a sure thing. 

“David, you can’t fucking _exorcise_ him,” Flower says and his voice is like ice water over David’s shoulders. 

“I won’t,” he snaps and whirls. 

Flower is staring at him with something so deeply familiar it stings. Opposing faceoff when the other player knows they’re outmatched, outgunned, outplayed on every surface. Fear. That’s fear, and it isn’t on Flower’s behalf. 

“I’m wouldn’t,” he promises, and absolutely means it. “I wouldn’t. But, just, there… there has to be something. Something I can do. You know?” 

“I don’t think this is a good idea,” Flower says. David looks at him and he still looks scared. Pale and shaken. He probably looks about as bad himself. 

He looks away, stares at the kids in the pool so hard he’s probably scaring a couple of them, and refuses to move until his heart has slowed again. It takes a really long time and eventually Flower leaves to take care of something for Vero and even then it takes a really long time.

-[]-

It happens with no fanfare, on a free Saturday after an easy practice, when David’s just thinking about what takeout he wants to order in that won’t fuck up his nutrition plan too much. He’s lying around on his couch looking at menus on his phone and Jon materializes next to him like he isn’t about to rock David like a proverbial hurricane.

“Hey, hold still,” Jon says and reaches out and-

Fingertips press against his shoulder. 

David doesn’t scream but he does haul in a breath. 

It feels like… 

He feels like he just got boarded. He feels like he’s had all the air driven right out of him, like he’s about to fall over. His face is probably doing something really humiliating and he truly cannot give a shit. He just keeps staring. 

Jon is so solid. He can barely see the room through him, the edges of him barely flickering. His eyes only glow a little bit. He’s smiling, that horrible dead-eyed thing David’s embarrassed to find so cute, and. 

Christ God. 

“Did I,” he chokes out, and he’s probably going to hell for a lot of reasons - he doesn’t even want think too hard about the dazzling spectrum of cardinal sins he’s committed - but where his brain goes immediately with the information Jon can touch him is up there. “Did I know you could do that?” 

Jon shrugs, murderer grin going even wider. 

“Practiced,” he says, and he’s fading already. David can’t look away. He’s not actually sure he’s breathing. 

It had felt nothing like being touched by a living person, is the thing. It had felt like the snap of static discharge but with none of the pain, just a burst of _what the fuck_ fading after a second into… Fuck, fuck. 

David finally manages to blink. Jon’s barely a coherent shape anymore but he can feel the judgmental eyebrows. 

“That is fucking, what,” David says and loses the plot of what he’s saying pretty much immediately. 

Jon grins. It’s just a slash of white against a slightly darker splash of color but it still somehow manages to be completely fucked up. 

The fondness jolts David mostly out of it. He shakes himself, because he’s been doing grand at holding himself together and like, this is not the most opportune time or place to have a breakdown. Or whatever it is the parts of him not locked down into spartan coherence are trying to do. David suspects he’s going to jerk off as soon as he can conceivably excuse himself for a shower. He needs to say something to throw Jon off the scent. 

“You’re a prick,” he decides on and everything is pretty much alright.

-[]-

Everything is not alright.

He’s still awake at something past two in the morning, thinking about Jon. Thinking about what this means, what any of it means. Jon can touch him. Jon could- he shuts that line of thought down, dizzy with how late it is. 

He thinks about Jon, about the little pieces of himself he’d let slip. How little he remembers. How he can’t leave the apartment. 

His chest kind of hurts, David notes, and turns over again to stare blankly at his dark wall.

-[]-

Tuch smiles at him like a motherfucker.

David really fucking _doesn’t_ like him, he realizes with all the fanfare of knowing something he’d already known. 

“Changed your mind about your ghost?” he asks and David works to keep his clenched jaw from turning into a right hook. He doesn’t want to punch a teammate no matter how badly they deserve it; there’s probably some kind of curse on that, and anyway he isn’t going to come out looking like the asshole in this if he has anything to say about it. 

“Sure,” he says, monotone. Tuch grins anyway. 

“Yeah, I have some things you’re going to wanna see,” he says, and turns deeper into his house. David follows, on the reasoning that fuck Tuch’s private spaces anyway and this is more likely to net him what he wants without ending up on Deadspin. 

It’s a pretty normal hockey player’s house. He follows Tuch through it to what’s probably the study and stands around awkwardly while Tuch pulls papers out of drawers and fucks around with a stapler theatrically. 

The stack of papers Tuch hands to him is thicker than he expected, a solid hundred or so pages. Some of them look like printouts, webpages coped wholesale or screenshots of things. Some of them look like they’ve been xeroxed from old books, and… Jesus. The sheer volume of the effort involved is staggering and more than a little nauseating. 

“Christ, Tuch,” David says thoughtlessly. “How much did you research?”

Tuch rolls his eyes at him and they might be something like cool with each other again, if only for the sake of the game, and David might need this from him... but he doesn't have to like the man. He really doesn’t like the man, not even a little bit, not at all. All he can hear when he looks at Tuch is what he'd said, _it's not like the thing’s alive_. 

“You caught me,” Tuch intones cynically. “I'm obsessed with your weird apartment ghost, can't stop thinking about it. _No_ , I just wanna be ready if I run into one of my own.” 

“Whatever, fuck you,” David says, and manages to maintain the veneer of it being a civil joke only by the skin of his teeth. 

Tuch smiles at him, mean and thin-lipped, and David knows Tuch knows what he thinks of him. 

“You’re lucky I had the visitor’s packet ready,” he mocks back, the edge to it so ugly if they were on ice and not on the same team David would drop gloves. They aren’t, and Tuch isn’t, so he keeps his fists to himself. But Tuch hands over the stack of printouts and David escapes with them, and that’s something.

-[]-

It turns out to be stupidly easy to find out too fucking much about Jon.

He makes sure to do it in his bedroom, when he’s certain Jon’s absorbed by the new season of the Bachelorette. He’d dragged the printer in when he’d first moved in, on reasoning he still isn’t entirely sure of due to the amount of day drinking that had been involved. His laptop lives there too, and his bottle of emergency tequila, and the bag of M&Ms for emergencies the tequila can’t fix.

The stack of Tuch’s research is at his elbow but he’s barely flipped through it. It makes him kind of nauseous, the idea of doing anything the pages to suggest to Jon. He really fucking hates Tuch. Instead he spends approximately two seconds searching his own address and the name ‘Jon’ and ends up reading an obituary. 

He wishes he hadn’t pretty instantaneously but he prints it, on the reasoning that he’d rather have it on hand without having to put it in his browser history again. 

He’s kind of shaking, he realizes when he pulls the warm paper from the tray. Shaking really fucking badly, actually. 

At least he has a last name now, he decides, and then shoves everything as far to the back of his mind as he can. It hurts too much to deal with so he locks it up tight in a little box inside himself, shoves the stack of papers under his bed with the printer and grabs the tequila out and, after a moment’s thought, the M&Ms too. 

He’ll pull it out after they get through the playoffs, he resolves as he twists the cap off the tequila. He’ll pull out the papers and talk to Jon and then they’ll have the whole of a Vegas summer to decide what to do.

-[]-

“You're so boring lately,” Eaks says and rolls his eyes. “You never come out anymore.”

“Did you get a girlfriend without telling us?” Subban puts in, sounding nearly sincerely hurt. David grimaces at him and he just makes an exaggerated frown at him right back. 

“No, fuck off,” David defends himself weakly. 

“He has a _ghost_ friend,” Bill puts in, grinning like he’d just made the funniest joke ever. 

“Fuck you,” David says, and everyone laughs even though he means it a little. “Jon is great.” 

“Dude, we're totally supportive of your secret girlfriend or like, ghost or whatever,” Subban says and throws an arm over David's shoulders. “But bro, we're lonely. We miss you. You gotta come out with us, for the _team_.” 

David groans and knocks Subban’s arm away. Subban just grins at him. He knows he's won. 

“Fine,” David says and continues talking over the noise of general celebration. “I will have _one_ drink, for the _team_.” 

“Yeah, totally, just one,” Eaks promises.

-[]-

He stumbles up the stairs to his apartment and reflects dizzily that Subban has picked up _entirely_ too much from Flower. His big wet persuasion eyes are nearly as powerful already, and he's barely even twenty-five.

He gets the door open eventually and trips over the welcome mat and falls right onto the entryway floor. Jon is waiting for him. David is pretty sure he’s looking judgmentally, but it’s hard to tell face down on the floor. 

“Party bus finally decide to drop you off?” he asks. Definitely judgmental. David turns over with a groan. 

“Goalies,” he says darkly and Jon sighs at him.

-[]-

He gets punched in the face and it isn’t even at a game.

It isn’t by a rival teammate, or an opportunistic Capitals fan, or even by one of the trainers when he’s wading through the cascade of tedious arguments they like to have about whether or not compression binding his ribs when they get creaky is a bad idea. It isn’t even by fucking _Tuch_. He gets decked by Smith, accidentally, at optional morning skate, and Smith is very very sorry. 

He tells David so repeatedly, at great length. David nods along patiently and winces his way through handing over the melting ice pack for a fresh one to lay over his eye. He’s going to have a hell of a shiner later, but it shouldn’t interfere with his vision and nothing was seriously hurt. He even thinks he’ll probably look kind of good. 

Rakish. A bad boy. The ladies will love it, even if David’s love life is now the kind of complicated that headlines blockbuster teen movies. He still appreciates being checked out. 

“Smith,” he says patiently when Smith goes around the full cycle of apologies to start again. “Smithy, my man.” 

Smith stops and bobs anxiously in place. He looks distinctly mournful. David would feel bad but his face kind of hurts a lot and he’s jonesing to go home and lay on his couch and whine at his ghost. He’s kind of looking forward to all the vile aspersions Jon is going to lay on Smith’s character and David’s own inability to avoid getting punched by a fucking _Ontarian_. 

“Yeah?” Smith prompts. 

“Fuck off and get me my bag,” David says and shoos him away with his free hand. Smith goes, grinning like David’s done him a favor.

-[]-

Jon does not, in fact, get right down to making relentless fun of David’s unfortunate injury.

He stares for a while, and when David isn’t looking brings the Advil up from the bathroom. He makes sure the ice pack stays cool, and he stares some more. David frowns at him and he frowns back, crackling a little at the edges like he’s made of static electricity. 

David puts on the Bachelorette, tuned to an episode they’ve already seen and David knows Jon hates. Jon doesn’t say a fucking word. 

He considers saying something about it but finds he doesn’t really have it in him to have a proper full argument, and anyway it’s not like Jon’s doing anything upsetting. He’d just been anticipating a little more reaction. 

The Bachelorette had become NHL highlights had become a truly, staggeringly bad Netflix comedy special. He’d made a sandwich, and Jon hadn’t even fucked with the process. It's like… peaceful. 

He wakes up with a jolt to find the room has gotten dark, the volume on the TV barely a murmur. The ice pack has slid to the floor, but the pain is basically gone unless he moves his face. 

There's a weird weight on his chest, a slight impression of pressure. When he cranes up a little it takes him some time for his fuzzy half-asleep brain to process what he's seeing. 

The vague jumbled shape of Jon, settled across his body like a heat mirage. He can kind of make out his face, eyes closed like he's sleeping. 

“Hi,” he mumbles groggily and the weight on him shifts, trickles away like water. Bright eyes blink down at him. 

He's too sleepy to really freak out. Instead he just feels warm down in his chest. 

“Go to bed,” Jon tells him, and he goes, and grins sleepily as he topples down into his sheets. His ghost totally cuddled him.

-[]-

“I think I look good,” David says, tilting his head back and forth to see the objectively gross purple and green bruise pouching under his eye. His reflection grins back at him, Jon a wavering mess of shadows and an approximation of a face at his shoulder.

Jon rolls his eyes, makes sure the definition of his form is good enough David can see. 

“You’re as ugly as you always are,” he says. “No worse, I guess.” 

David grins happily. He _totally_ looks good.

-[]-

“What does it mean if someone cuddles you while you're sleeping?” David asks.

Engelland just looks at him. 

“Not in a creepy way,” David hastens to clarify. 

Engelland looks at him some more. His expression is- not promising. 

“Alright,” David decides. He gets up to leave. Maybe he shouldn't have done this right at the end of practice. Also maybe with someone else, though Reaves would have laughed at him and Flower would probably have just started playing Careless Whisper at him from his phone. Engelland just seems so _put together_ compared to most of them. “Thanks, good talk.”

Engelland heaves a sigh and grabs his arm before he can get away. 

“Pear, you're thirty-one,” he says and he sounds distinctly disgruntled. “You know what it means.” 

Engelland is exactly right. David grins at him. 

“Thanks,” he says, and means it this time.

-[]-

He steps into the apartment and knows something is wrong immediately.

All the lights are off and the temperature is icy, almost burning against his skin. The darkness is absolutely silent. It reminds him of Quebec winters, a snow flurry against his cheeks, and he blinks away the memory to find that his place is fucking trashed. 

The chairs are strewn from the kitchen to the living room. His magazines are scattered pages, slippery underfoot, glinting up at him when he flips the lights on. The TV is off and the pots and pans are on the floor, his- his fucking _PS3_ is on the floor too, broken right open in shards of plastic and electronics. 

Jon is nowhere in sight. Something cold and frightened stirs in David’s chest. 

He sets his bag down carefully at the door. The thump echoes in the silence, the absolutely terrifying emptiness of his apartment. Nothing moves at all. 

“Jon?” he calls quietly, and there’s a rustle from the direction of his bedroom. 

The lights are dim when he flips them on and it leaves him squinting as he feels his way down the hallway. Half the pictures have fallen off the walls, and he picks his way carefully through them. There’s no broken glass at least.

His bedroom is dark and the light doesn’t work when he flips the switch. Enough light slips through the gap in the curtains for him to see the shadowed mass of Jon at least. 

He’s hovering over the bed, a tumorous mass of darkness and ugly angles that make no sense. After a sick moment of bafflement David decides Jon’s probably got his back to him, but it’s hard to tell. Nothing about the shape of the slowly bubbling mass of what should be his ghost makes sense. 

“Jon?” he asks, his voice catching in his throat. 

Bright lantern eyes out of the darkness, and David realizes he has no idea at _all_ what he’s looking at. 

“What the fuck,” Jon’s voice hisses out of the dark and he- 

He bursts into flame. 

He’s a flickering shade, a roaring furnace of shapes and outlines. A slash of teeth, white as bone, anything but a smile. His eyes burning and burning like coals in a face that makes David’s stomach roil because there’s something wrong, there’s something so wrong, he can see what’s _under_ it. 

He swallows back vomit and looks down. 

Tuch’s papers flutter in the breeze Jon’s anger is kicking up. His research too, the notes and printouts, Jon’s history. His _obituary_. 

“Fuck,” David coughs up. 

Jon flares, a twisting mass of shadows and his mouth opening in a scream octaves higher than David can hear. It buzzes in his ears and he throws his hands over them, ducking a little against the way the wind kicks higher. It feels like the walls are shaking and he stumbles back, one step and then another.

Things in the kitchen start cracking, gunshot crystal noises, the tinkle of glass against counter and linoleum. 

“Jon!” he shouts, hands still over his ears, because he needs to- he needs to make Jon listen-

“ _Get out,_ ” Jon screams. 

David breaks for the door as the light overhead shatters, raining sparks and shards of glass in the sudden darkness.

-[]-

He spends a time that he doesn’t really have the frame for staring at his front door.

It’s featureless except for the scuff near the bottom where he’d kicked it once, drunk and frustrated. There’s no sound from it. The storm Jon had summoned, the horrible monster he’d become, all locked away neatly by the boundaries of the property. Jon doesn’t exist outside of his apartment, and now David isn’t allowed into it. 

He swallows down acrid bile and turns blindly for the stairs.

-[]-

Flower answers his doorbell on the second ring. This is good, because David isn’t sure where else to go.

“I fucked up,” David says without preamble and Flower stares at him for a moment. 

“I’m having dinner,” he says at last, and David has just enough time to feel incredibly guilty before Flower shrugs and steps aside. “We’re having barbeque chicken if you’d like some. We can discuss you fucking up after Scarlett’s put to bed, hmm?” 

“Yes, sure, yes please,” David stays and nearly falls over with relief as he steps inside. 

They let him sit with them at the table and even offer him some food, which he accepts mostly so he isn’t just sitting there in front of an empty place setting and staring at them like he’s just witnessed a murder. He’s holding it together alright, and there’s kind of no excuse for fucking up a family dinner. He even sits through dessert and picks at the diet-conscious cobbler Vero serves him a tiny portion of. 

“It’s delicious,” he tells her sincerely, because he knows it is even if he hadn’t actually put any in his mouth. She smiles at him graciously and seriously, he owes the Fleurys so much it makes him a little nauseous. 

Flower pulls him to the den when they’re done, Vero taking the kids. He doesn’t really say anything; he just looks at David avoiding his eyes like he’s assessing him. Like he’s compiling evidence or something. 

“Something happened with Jon,” he concludes shrewdly, abrupt in the silence, and David stops being able to look at him. He looks down at his hands instead. They’re clenched white-knuckle around each other. His stomach is churning because Jon-

“His last name is Marchessault,” he says quietly. 

“Marchessault,” Flower echoes, accent soft and kind over the syllables. David swallows. It clicks loudly in the silence. 

“Jonathan Audy-Marchessault. He’s from Quebec too. He’d be about my age, if.” 

Flower’s hand lands on his shoulder and David doesn’t flinch. 

“He died in my apartment,” he says, and his voice doesn’t break. “It was his apartment, but, you know. Home invasion.” 

“ _Criss_ ,” Flower hisses and David hauls in a breath that shudders. 

“Yeah,” he agrees quietly, and doesn’t look up from the carpet. “He found the obituary I printed. And… and some other things.” 

“Other things,” Flower says, and David can pretty much hear the moment he understands. “Oh, fuck, you went to _Tuch_.” 

“I just wanted to know the options,” he says into his palms. “I would never, I would _never_... not without him asking me, I would never.” 

Flower’s fingers dig into the meat of his shoulder and he looks up into Flower’s eyes. They’re dark and sad and angry and difficult to meet, but David forces himself to. He deserves that. He deserves all of it. 

“Does Jon know you wouldn’t?” he asks quietly. 

_Yes,_ David wants to say. _Fuck, yes, of course._

But he thinks of the whirling, horrible shape that Jon's anger had made out of him, how it hadn't been just anger. The way Jon had screamed at him. How much of that scream had been fear. 

He exhales and it shudders in his lungs. 

“He bled out in my fucking bedroom,” he says, soft. “I couldn't, I could never…” 

“He doesn't know that,” Flower says, uncompromising. He's got his fucking game face on and it would make David laugh but it's not even remotely funny. 

“I have to tell him,” David says. 

Flower claps his hands. 

“ _Yes,_ ” he snaps, “yes! You should have told him from the start, or _listened_ to me.” 

David shoots him a look and he settles back a little, nose wrinkling. 

“I will,” he resolves and hauls in a breath that feels like the first one to reach his lungs in way too long. “Just… tomorrow. I should… I should try to be coherent.”

-[]-

He’s not sure why he’s expecting his door to be locked, because he definitely hadn’t locked it before he left and he’s not sure if Jon’s influence even extends that far. It isn’t locked, either way. It swings open when he turns the knob, and nothing gets thrown at him, and no one is screaming.

His apartment is a fucking mess. 

Half of his chairs are broken. Everything smaller than that is on the floor and most of it is broken, there’s stuffing from the shredded couch scattered over everything in little tufts. His television is spiderwebbed with cracks and buzzes at him until he edges through the broken glass and detritus to turn it off. The lights don’t work, but the curtains are ripped to shreds too and it lets in enough light to see. 

David thinks that he’s lucky he has an NHL salary to replace all of his shit, and then grimaces at himself and moves on. 

Jon isn’t in the living room or the kitchen. David hadn’t really expected him to be. 

His bathroom makes him wince when he glances into it. There isn’t any mirror anymore, and there isn’t much of anything else recognizable either. There’s toothpaste and shampoo everywhere, a spray of coagulating soap out into the hallway making the already treacherous footing even worse. 

His bedroom door is closed. He spends way too long just looking at it. There’s noise coming from it, a faint rattle and something banging against the wall. He suspects it’s one of his pucks. 

When he opens the door he steps into a storm. 

For a moment he’s hit by a sick pulse of déjà vu because it doesn’t seem like Jon’s moved at all. He’s still a mass of darkness that hurts to try to sort into a shape that makes sense, hovering in a slow, writhing mess at the end of David’s shredded bed. There’s still wind that doesn’t make sense, pounding against him as he staggers forward a step, trying to keep his footing. It’s tossing paper shreds and bits of clothing across the floor. 

“ _I told you to go_ ,” Jon says. 

It’s a hiss. It comes from all directions. It kind of hurts David’s ear drums. 

He hauls in a breath. It’s hard; the whole room is heavy with a pressure that makes no rational sense. His ribs creak a little with it. 

“I’m sorry,” David says, because it’s true and he is and he can’t think of anything else to say. 

The wind screams into a hurricane. What might be Jon’s mouth yawns out of the horrible mass of him, a white slash of teeth twisted and open in a scream. It’s gone again a moment later, vanishing in the bubbling form. Paper batters against his legs and then whisks past again, swirling around and around the tiny room. 

“Listen!” he shouts. “Jesus, Jon, please!” 

It’s hard to make out but the noise fades just a little. 

“I like you,” he tells Jon helplessly and the hurricane dies. 

It doesn’t stop entirely. The papers are whipping across the floor, nothing but shreds anymore. The lamp is broken but the lights overhead flicker in irregular time, dimming and brightening in no pattern he can recognize. The curtains are hanging in tatters and the bed is shredded. Jon is still a swirl of dark, ugly angles at the foot of the mattress but David’s pretty sure he’s looking now. He can still tell. 

His chest aches. 

“You _like_ me,” echoes off the walls. It sounds distinctly horrible. 

“Stupid amounts,” David promises and dares a step closer. “It’s a little disgusting.” 

Jon laughs and it’s absolutely not a happy sound, but he’s fading into his familiar shape a little bit. David can make out the potential for bent shoulders, a hand in dark hair. A pair of eyes, there and gone again, blue and shining like flashlights. 

“Like me so much you want to kill me again, eh?” Jon demands, voice raw, and David is hit in the shoulder by a piece of paper. When he grabs it to see what it is he’s not all that surprised to find a shred of the exorcism ritual’s ingredients list. 

“I would never,” he answers and lets the paper fall from numb fingers. He’s such a fucking idiot. He’s always known that but it’s spiny and hurting in his throat. “I wouldn’t, I fucking promise you.” 

The wind dies to a breeze. Papers eddy across the floor and brush by the toes of David’s shoes. 

“You wanted to exorcise me,” Jon whispers, and he sounds as far away as he ever has. A small voice at the other end of a long tunnel. David braves another step closer. 

“I didn’t, I,” he tries to say and his voice gets lost for a second. He has to swallow a few times to get it back. “I don’t- I don’t think I could. Maybe, if you asked, but. I don’t think I could.” 

Jon looks at him, a pair of lantern eyes peering out at him. His shoulders are firming up out of the swirling chaos, the hint of dark hair falling across a forehead that doesn’t quite exist. He looks small despite the breeze still shuffling fitfully around the room. He looks small, and hunched in on himself, and David aches. 

“I don’t understand,” he says at last. His voice sounds closer, at least. “You have the ritual. You hid it from me.” 

David takes the last step, comes even with the end of the bed. He could reach out and get his hand into the swirling liquid mass of Jon. He has no idea how it would feel. He wants to know, abruptly. He always wants to know everything about Jon. 

“I like you,” he repeats. “I, I don’t. Jon. I _like_ you.” 

Jon stares at him for a heartbreaking moment. 

“Oh,” he says. “You mean in a gay way.” 

David chokes, inhales spit, and has to fold himself over to cough it out. 

“ _Yes_ ,” he manages at last, “you _asshole_. In a gay way.”

Jon stares at him some more. He's settled, kind of. Still fuzzy at the edges but the roiling chaos has died down. 

“But I'm dead,” he says at last. 

“Oh, really?” David asks. “I hadn't noticed.” 

Jon laughs, a quick jerky honk of a sound that looks like it startles him as much as David. “You’re such a dick,” he says, and David’s chest aches. He likes Jon so _much_. 

“I wouldn’t exorcise you,” he promises. There’s simple conviction in his voice and he hopes Jon can hear it. The way Jon looks at him, for just a second snapping into crystal focus and nearly entirely opaque, he thinks he might. 

“Then,” Jon says and he moves forward a little bit. Close enough for David to pick out the patchy stubble Jon doesn’t usually manifest, the odd little crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes. “Then, why did you have the ritual? I don’t get it.” 

“I don’t,” David begins, realizes he has no idea what he’s trying to say, and coughs. Jon stares at him. David tries to gather himself, which is fucking hard, because all he can think about it how he’s never seen this expression on Jon’s face before. 

“David, stop being a bitch and tell me,” Jon says, shading into impatience, and David croaks a little laugh. 

“I wanted to know if there was, you know, a way I could… if I could help. Give you more than just a shitty apartment you can’t leave,” he manages at last. He has to look down at the shredded sheets, because he can’t focus enough to put words together while looking at Jon. 

That’s how he misses Jon moving. The touch to his shoulder jolts him, his head coming up, and Jon is so _close_ -

The kiss lasts for a moment and cracks David right open. 

Jon falls apart against him, fading and collapsing into the familiar mess of shape and color that resolves into something vaguely human only when David squints. He can kind of feel it, can feel Jon pressing against him, a vague pressure against his ribs, faint weight on his shoulders. Nothing like a human touch, but. 

“Jon,” he says. Croaks. His voice is broken. 

“I like you too,” Jon says, echoey and faint. “In a gay way.”


End file.
